Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 GEORGE 
 BUCHANAN
 
 FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 
 
 The following Volumes are now ready : 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON. 
 
 ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. 
 
 HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK. 
 
 JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES. 
 
 ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN. 
 
 THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE. 
 
 RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS. 
 
 SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON. 
 
 THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE. 
 
 JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK. 
 
 TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. 
 
 FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND. 
 
 THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS. 
 
 NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD. 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor SAINTSBURY. 
 
 KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. BARBE. 
 
 ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. GROSART. 
 
 JAMES THOMSON. By WILLIAM BAYNE. 
 
 MUNGO PARK. By T. BANKS MACLACHLAN. 
 
 DAVID HUME. By Professor CALDERWOOD. 
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. 
 
 SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor MURISON. 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By MARGARET MOYES 
 
 BLACK. 
 
 THOMAS REID. By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER. 
 POLLOK AND AYTOUN. By ROSALINE MASSON. 
 ADAM SMITH. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON. 
 ANDREW MELVILLE. By WILLIAM MORISON. 
 JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER. By E. S. HALDANE. 
 KING ROBERT THE BRUCE. By A. F. MURISON. 
 JAMES HOGG. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS. 
 THOMAS CAMPBELL. By J. CUTHBERT HADDEN. 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN. By ROBERT WALLACE. 
 
 Completed by J. CAMPBELL SMITH.
 
 GEORGE 
 BUCHANAN 
 
 BY ROBERT 
 WALLACE 
 
 COMPLETED BY : 3 
 CAMPBELL- SMITH 
 
 FAMOUS 
 
 SCOTS: 
 
 SERIE5 
 
 PUBLISHED BY & 
 OLIPHANT ANDERSON 
 VTERRIER-EDINBVRGH 
 AND LONDON ^ <Si
 
 The designs and ornaments of this 
 volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, 
 and the printing from the press of 
 Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE concluding chapter of the book I intended to serve 
 the purpose of prologue and epilogue, but on reflection 
 I find that readers both in and out of Scotland may 
 desire to be told a little more about Robert Wallace, 
 M.A., D.D., and M.P., a collocation of titles of honour, 
 so far as I know, unexampled. He was a minister of 
 the Church of Scotland from the summer of 1857 to 
 the autumn of 1876 ; was in succession the minister of 
 Newton-on-Ayr, of Trinity College Church, Edinburgh, 
 and of Old Greyfriars', Edinburgh, in which last he 
 succeeded Dr. Robert Lee, as also in the leadership of 
 the Liberal Party of the Church of Scotland. The 
 degree of D.D. was conferred upon him by the Uni- 
 versity of Glasgow, pretty much, it was believed, through 
 the influence of Dr. Caird, the most eloquent preacher 
 and one of the most profound theologians of our day. 
 After Dr. Wallace became editor of the Scotsman he 
 resigned his chair of Church History, his church, and 
 even his licence to preach, and he left in abeyance the 
 title of D.D., and became in his time, as a barrister-at- 
 law, plain Mr. Robert Wallace. But the degree of a 
 university is, I believe, indelible, and he will always be 
 Dr. Wallace to me. His degree of M.A., like mine, was 
 conferred by the University of St. Andrews in April 
 1853 after four years' study, during which we attended 
 simultaneously every Humanity class. He was first in
 
 vi FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 every literary class, and by far the best classical scholar 
 of my day. Dr. Alexander, the venerable professor of 
 Greek, who had taught for thirty years, pronounced 
 him the best student he had ever taught. 
 
 His splendid classical attainments, the erudition 
 necessary to the chair of Church History, his extensive 
 and distinguished practice as a debating gladiator in 
 Church Courts, especially the General Assembly, 
 perhaps even his experience in the solid, stolid, non- 
 mercurial House of Commons, all fitted him, as few 
 men have been fit, to do justice to the life, labours, 
 and supreme European culture of George Buchanan. 
 
 To equal fitness I do not pretend. To the best of 
 my ability I have tried to complete the unfinished task 
 of my friend, with whom I at intervals interchanged 
 ideas since the beginning of our college career in 
 October 1849. I am not sure ne would have agreed 
 with all I say in the last chapter. For the views 
 expressed therein I alone am responsible. 
 
 From one error in fact and a doubtful assumption as to 
 Buchanan's relation to Montaigne, the ' representative ' 
 sceptic, I have been saved by Dr. P. Hume Brown, the 
 author of the best life of Buchanan, whose knowledge 
 of the history of Buchanan and his contemporaries is 
 probably unrivalled. He read the proof-sheets, and 
 for his friendly, disinterested attention Dr. Wallace's 
 representatives and I are greatly obliged to him, as all 
 readers ought to be, for they have the assurance that 
 the most enlightened eye on the subject of Buchanan 
 examined what they are expected to believe. 
 
 J. CAMPBELL SMITH. 
 DUNDEE, December 1899.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PRELIMINARY AND GENERAL ..... 9 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 CHARACTERISTICS 26 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 CHARACTERISTICS (continued) 48 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS .66 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM 89 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS in 
 
 EPILOGISTIC . .138 
 
 INDEX . . . . . ... . . 147
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRELIMINARY AND GENERAL 
 
 ON the 2ist July 1683, Lord William Russell was 
 beheaded in Lincoln's Inn Fields, because Charles n., 
 F.D., who never said a foolish thing, and never did 
 a wise one, thought it would help to keep alive the 
 Stuart doctrine of the Divine right of kings. On the 
 same day, the political writings of George Buchanan 
 and one John Milton were, by decree of the learned 
 and loyal University of Oxford, publicly burned in front 
 of their Schools by the common hangman, because 
 they were regarded as the most formidable and danger- 
 ous defences of the principles on account of which it 
 had been considered judicious to kill Lord William 
 Russell, and perhaps also in token that if Buchanan 
 and Milton had not been dead they might have been 
 burned too, along with their books. It is comforting 
 to reflect that this same decree was subsequently burned
 
 io FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 with the same publicity and by the same common 
 hangman, one would hope. 
 
 At the time, however, the Oxford transaction, in 
 view of the sycophancy, obscurantism, and other 
 degrading characteristics of the then University, was the 
 highest compliment that could have been paid to 
 Buchanan and Milton, and especially to Buchanan. 
 For Buchanan was substantially a century before Mil- 
 ton, who, like the rest of the Roundheads, was inspired 
 by Buchanan's principles and greatly assisted by his 
 arguments. Dryden, indeed, declared that Milton stole 
 his Defence of the People of England from Buchanan's 
 Dejure Regni apud Scotos; but that was only Glorious 
 John's' inglorious way of making himself contro- 
 versially disagreeable. Milton put his own genius and 
 experience into Buchanan's idea, and produced an 
 essentially original work. But what although he had 
 not? Milton was fighting a great battle, and was 
 entitled, or rather bound, to use the best weapons, 
 wherever he could get them. The anti-plagiarising 
 spirit is often a mere form of vanity. If the Royal 
 Artillery declined to plagiarise from Armstrong and 
 Krupp, and insisted on making all their ammuni- 
 tion themselves, I should tremble for the defence of 
 the country. Not the less, however, does Buchanan 
 amply merit the title of ' Father of Liberalism,' since
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN n 
 
 the principles which he successfully floated in unpro- 
 pitious times undoubtedly produced the two great 
 English, the American, and the first French Revolu- 
 tions, with all their continuations and consequences. 
 
 Let it be noted that the distinction which Buchanan 
 achieved in this matter was not merely that of the 
 political philosopher and thinker. The publication of 
 the De Jure, at the time and under the circumstances 
 in which it appeared, was a blow of the utmost con- 
 sequence, delivered in the great politico-theological 
 struggle with which he was contemporary. It was like 
 one of Knox's famous sermons, which were not mere 
 religious meditations, but political events of the most 
 immense influence, present and future. The Reforma- 
 tion, particularly in Scotland, was, in its inception and 
 establishment, a political, quite as much as a religious 
 revolution, of which Buchanan was not simply an 
 interested but recluse critic and dilettante spectator. 
 He thought profoundly about what he saw going on, 
 but he also threw his thoughts into the fight that was 
 raging round him, with bombshell results, and the 
 effects of what he thought and did upon the fortunes of 
 the great struggle for popular liberty against usurping 
 ascendency a struggle not even yet concluded prove 
 him to have possessed qualities of far-sightedness and 
 statesmanship of the highest order.
 
 12 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 In a totally different walk of life he achieved almost 
 equal distinction. He was a great scholar-poet and 
 general writer ; and when, in this connection, I use the 
 words 'almost equal,' I am thinking of the question 
 whether the director of human affairs or the artist in 
 words and ideas of beauty or human interest is the 
 greater. Of course, comparison of things or people 
 generically distinct is scarcely possible. You can hardly 
 compare a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems 
 less difficult to ask whether Csesar or Shakespeare, 
 Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater 
 man. However that may be, there can be no doubt 
 that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intel- 
 lectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an 
 unsurpassed European reputation among the Renais- 
 sance magnates of his day. Henri Estienne, for instance, 
 Buchanan's Stephanus, our Stephens said that he 
 was poetarum nostri saculi facile princeps, meaning 
 thereby ' easily the first poet of our time,' which is 
 sufficiently strong. Of course it may be said that 
 Estienne or Stephens was only a printer. But there 
 are printers and printers, and Stephanus belonged to 
 the second class. Anybody who knows anything about 
 the literary history of the time will understand that such 
 praise from Estienne implied a very great deal. 
 
 Then there were the Scaligers, Julius Caesar/^, and
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 13 
 
 Joseph fits, a greater man than his father, in the opinion 
 of the best judges himself included, probably. They 
 were not men easy to please, the Scaligers. Even 
 Erasmus was not good enough for Julius Caesar, who 
 used language truly awful about the glory of the priest- 
 hood and the shame. As for Joseph, there was but 
 one man alive in his own line for whom he had a vestige 
 of respect, and that was Casaubon ; and he told him 
 so, intimating that he might think a good deal of the 
 compliment, as he, Joseph, was the only man in Europe 
 who was capable of forming an opinion about him a 
 perfectly true if not absolutely humble observation. 
 But however difficult to please in most cases, the 
 Scaligers had a sincere and unbounded admiration of 
 Buchanan an admiration abundantly shown while he 
 lived, and when he was gone, expressed, especially by 
 the younger Scaliger, with a tenderness and beauty 
 which stamp the tribute with authority and value. His 
 epitaphium on Buchanan concluded thus : 
 
 ' Namque ad supremum perducta Poetica culmen 
 
 In te stat, nee quo progrediatur habet. 
 Imperil fuerat Romani Scotia limes ; 
 Romani eloquii Scotia finis erit.' 
 
 Anybody with a fair understanding of Latin and 
 a full understanding of epigram, who reads the last
 
 i 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 couplet here, will know that Scaliger was perfectly 
 qualified to pronounce a judgment in the matter. 
 For the benefit of the man in the street, it may be 
 stated that what Scaliger was driving at was that 
 Buchanan had brought poetry to a pitch of perfection 
 beyond which it could not go ; and that as Scotland 
 had in the past been the last line of expansion for the 
 Roman Empire, so in the future it would, in the person 
 of Buchanan, be found to have given the highest note 
 of Roman eloquence. Of course it may be said that 
 this was only the customary and privileged lie of the 
 epitaph; but that it was really Scaliger's deliberate 
 opinion appears from a well-known quotation from 
 his table-talk, that 'in Latin poetry Buchanan stands 
 alone in Europe, and leaves everybody else behind.' 
 Coming to more modern times, it will probably be 
 admitted that Wordsworth knew good poetry when he 
 saw it, and he says of one of Buchanan's poems by 
 no means his best that it was equal in sentiment, 
 if not in elegance, to anything in Horace. 
 
 This he said before a pedantic relative pointed out 
 a false quantity. What he would have felt had he 
 known this before he read the poem, Schoolmaster only 
 knows. What the latter potentate would have done 
 we may partly surmise from what Person actually 
 did when some one got him to commence reading
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 15 
 
 Buchanan's poetry and he stumbled up against a false 
 quantity, or what he regarded as such. He at once 
 got up and pitched the volume across the room in 
 disgust, probably with an accompaniment of expres- 
 sions not loud but deep. Regarding which behaviour, 
 two remarks seem natural. The first is that possibly 
 Buchanan was right and Person wrong. At Eton, as 
 is well known, Porson was a poor quantitarian, and fell 
 behind in consequence. He may have made up his 
 leeway afterwards, but not likely, and certainly his 
 line of scholarship was not in the direction of Latin 
 Prosody. 
 
 But suppose Buchanan were wrong, what then? 
 Is Shakespeare to be flung into the corner because 
 many of his lines will not scan ? An indignant critic 
 of the Agamemnon has discovered, what I believe 
 is the fact, that in that play ^Eschylus has violated 
 Dawes's canon. Yet everybody that can reads the 
 Agamemnon, Dr. Johnson points out that Milton uses 
 the hideous solecism vapulandum. Only think of it ! 
 And yet we read Paradise Lost. Perhaps Porson did 
 too, knowing nothing of vapulandum \ Johnson was 
 no such stickler, for he read and enjoyed Milton, 
 vapulandum notwithstanding. He had also the high- 
 est opinion of Buchanan, both as a Latinist and as 
 'a great poetical genius,' and his authority on such
 
 1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 matters, being both poet and critic himself, is much 
 greater than Person's, great though the latter was in 
 his own department of research. Hallam is inclined to 
 qualify the almost universal admiration of Buchanan's 
 poetry, but one begins to doubt Hallam's judgment in 
 this matter when he finds him preferring Buchanan's 
 De Sphara to the rest of his poetry. The Sphere may 
 contain exquisite isolated passages ' equal to Virgil,' as 
 the enthusiastic Guy Patin maintained, but it is not 
 properly a poem at all. It is really a versified and 
 very lame defence of the exploded Ptolemaic Astro- 
 nomy, totally destitute of the human interest which 
 inspires so much else that Buchanan wrote. On his 
 own field of history Hallam is more of an authority, 
 and here his admiration of Buchanan is unstinted and 
 unequivocal. He extols the ' perspicuity and power ' 
 of the History of Scottish Affairs, recognises the 
 ' purity ' of its diction, and affirms that few writings of 
 the Latinists are ' more redolent of the antique air,' 
 and is almost as emphatic in his eulogy as Dryden, 
 when the latter says of Buchanan, ' our isle may justly 
 boast in him a writer comparable to any of the 
 moderns, and excelled by few of the ancients.' Froude 
 might be cited to the same effect, but enough has been 
 said to establish Buchanan's fame and power in the 
 world of letters.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 17 
 
 Of course, care must be taken to distinguish the 
 precise character of Buchanan's scholarship. He was 
 not a scholar in the sense that Casaubon, or Person, 
 or Liddell and Scott were scholars. That is to say, 
 he was not a classical antiquarian, or philologist, or 
 grammarian, although he knew antiquities and such 
 philology as was going, and had refurbished or even 
 made a grammar or two as he went along. But he 
 used these simply as instruments to his main aim as 
 a scholar, which was to write as good Latin as Virgil, 
 or Livy, or Horace, or Tacitus. There is nothing 
 absurd or impossible in such an aim. I have heard 
 ardent Aberdonians maintain that the late Dr. Melvin 
 of their city wrote better Latin than Cicero, and, apart 
 from the matter, I am quite ready to believe it. 
 That Buchanan as good as accomplished his purpose 
 we have already seen. 
 
 And be it remembered that all this cultivation of a 
 Latin style was not mere dilettante work on his part. 
 He and one Sturm of Strasbourg, along with other 
 Humanists, had formed the design of making Latin 
 the vernacular of Europe, and actually believed that 
 it would ultimately become such. Hence they had a 
 twofold purpose in writing Latin. They desired to 
 forward this reform of a universal language, and they 
 wished to be intelligible to a Latin-speaking posterity. 
 
 B
 
 1 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 I state this on the authority of Dr. P. Hume Brown, 
 the well-known author of George Buchanan, Humanist 
 and Reformer, and I should not advise any one rashly 
 to contradict Dr. Brown on any Buchanan matter. 
 He seems to me to have mastered the entire subject, 
 and to have left very little for subsequent research to 
 do, unless some lucky ' find ' of new sources should 
 occur. I have been able to glean nothing from any 
 quarter that I have not found already known to Dr. 
 Brown, and recorded by him, unless it be some such 
 small fact as the presence of Joseph Scaliger in Edin- 
 burgh in 1566, along with his friend Chastaigner, but 
 not expressly to see Buchanan ; and other little things 
 of that sort. I do not pretend to contribute any fresh 
 Buchanan materials. My object is the humble, but not, 
 I hope, useless one of boiling down Dr. Brown and 
 the other scientific biographers, and attempting a brief 
 popular presentation of what Buchanan was and did. 
 
 Another proof of the varied power of Buchanan 
 is found in the storm he raised as a controversialist, 
 in the still burning question as to the guilt or 
 innocence of Mary Queen of Scots. In 1571, four 
 years after the Scottish people had deposed their 
 sovereign, Buchanan published a pamphlet, or what 
 in these days would probably have taken the shape 
 of a magazine article, with the title Detectio Maria
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 19 
 
 Regina, i.e. The Detection or Exposure of Queen Mary, 
 or as an editor of to-day would have been sure to 
 head it, The Truth about the Queen. Buchanan's 
 object in this publication is to vindicate the Scottish 
 people and their leaders before the public opinion 
 of Europe for having, after the murder of Darnley, 
 brought Mary's career as sovereign to a close, as 
 being not only a public danger, but a public scandal. 
 That the vigour of the brochure itself, backed up by 
 Buchanan's immense reputation, went far to make 
 Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is 
 beyond question. To the same extent he made him- 
 self the bete noire of Mary's friends and apologists, 
 and very brutal and very black they certainly made 
 him out to be. In more recent times a school of 
 sentimental historians has arisen, who refuse to see 
 in Mary either fault or flaw, and recognise in her a 
 sort of spotless goddess, of irresistible charm, thrown 
 away upon an unworthy age. Not content with pity 
 it would be inhuman not to feel it in any case 
 they show how true it is that pity is akin to love, 
 and falling victims in some degree to the spell which 
 ruined the unhappy and love-maddened Chastelard, 
 they conduct a necessarily Platonic flirtation with 
 their idol's romantic and fascinating memory, across 
 the separating interval of three hundred years. Had
 
 20 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Mary been ugly, or even plain, she would have had 
 fewer champions. 
 
 In vituperation of Buchanan they are not a whit 
 behind his contemporary assailants. Mr. Hosack, for 
 instance, one of the most ingenious of Mary's modern 
 defenders, calmly says, ' Buchanan was without doubt 
 the most venal and unscrupulous of men.' His usual 
 way of alluding to the Detectio is ' Buchanan's famous 
 libel,' varied occasionally by 'the highly coloured 
 narrative of Buchanan,' or ' the subsequently invented 
 slanders of Buchanan,' or 'the slanderous narrative of 
 Buchanan,' or ' the atrocious libel of Buchanan.' Sir 
 John Skelton, whose treatment of the subject is dis- 
 tinguished by a literary grace which cannot be claimed 
 for Mr. Hosack, is on a level with him when he 
 reaches Buchanan. 'Buchanan's atrocious libel' is 
 common form with the Marians, and Sir John has 
 it. Perhaps his gentlest reference is when he speaks 
 of 'the industrious animosity of the man who had 
 been her pensioner,' and when he desires to be 
 specially severe, he speaks of 'grotesque adventures 
 invented, or at least adapted, by Buchanan, whose 
 virulent animosities were utterly unscrupulous, and 
 whose clumsy invective was as bitter as it was 
 pedantic.' The present is not the place to inquire 
 into the truth or falsehood of these statements. They
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 21 
 
 are adduced merely as a tribute to Buchanan's power. 
 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of 
 you,' does not logically justify the counter statement, 
 1 Good for you when all men shall speak ill of you ' ; 
 but when a controversialist has been abused by his 
 opponents as Buchanan has been, it is at least a 
 proof that he has been found a formidable antagonist, 
 either for his ability or veracity, or both, and that 
 in the direct ratio of the violence with which they 
 attack him. 
 
 One other aspect of Buchanan's varied power seems 
 to call for some mention. Up to the middle of this 
 century, a chapbook usually entitled The Witty and 
 Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan^ sometimes 
 adding The Kings Jester, ran through many editions 
 original and revised, and had a certain vogue all 
 over Scotland among a considerable class not the 
 most refined, certainly of the population. It is an 
 ignorant, coarse, and indecent production, and can 
 be read only by the historical student for the purpose 
 of investigating the popular taste of its time. Its 
 description of Buchanan as the 'Fule' instead of 
 the tutor of King James, and its placing him at the 
 English court of James, who did not ascend the 
 throne of England until Buchanan had been twenty- 
 one years dead, are sufficient commentary on its
 
 22 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 historical accuracy. At first sight one might imagine 
 that it had been put together by an enemy of 
 Buchanan, but its brutish zeal in holding up Buchanan 
 as a desperately clever fellow who was continually 
 turning the tables and raising the laugh against people 
 who wished to take him off, and who were generally 
 English, and often English nobles, bishops or other 
 clergy, show that it was earnest in its admiration 
 according to its dim and dirty lights. 
 
 Buchanan was a humorist, and saw the ludicrous 
 side of existence with a depth and keenness and 
 enjoyment very different from the barbarian faculty 
 which produced the ' merry bourds ' of Knox and 
 certain of his iconoclastic cronies. Even the prospect 
 of having soon to leave the world could not make 
 him utterly solemn, although the circumstances lend 
 a grim aspect to the humour which may make it dis- 
 tasteful to wooden seriousness. ' Tell the people who 
 sent you,' he said to the macer of the Court of Session, 
 who came to summon him for something objection- 
 able in some of his writings, 'tell them I am sum- 
 moned before a higher tribunal.' When good John 
 Davidson called on him and reminded him of the 
 usual evangelical consolations, he repaid him with 
 some original causticity d propos of the Romish doc- 
 trine of the Mass, which would no doubt delight that
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 23 
 
 worthy man. He never had much money at any 
 time, and less than usual at the close; and when, 
 on counting it up with his attendant, he found that 
 there was not enough to bury him, he directed it to 
 be given to the poor. But ' what about the funeral ? ' 
 naturally asked the servitor. 'Well,' Buchanan said, 
 ' he was very indifferent about that,' as he meditated 
 on the dilemma in which he saw he was placing the 
 people of Edinburgh, who had not been over kind to 
 the greatest scholar of the age. 'If they will not 
 bury me,' he said, ' they can let me lie where I am, 
 or throw my body where they like.' Of course, as 
 he knew, they had to bury him, so he could enjoy 
 his posthumous triumph of wit; but they had their 
 repartee, denying him a gravestone for a generation 
 or two. 
 
 There is a weird humour in the famous interview 
 between himself on the one hand and the Melvilles, 
 Andrew and James, on the other, who had crossed 
 from St. Andrews to Edinburgh to see him shortly 
 before he passed away. They found him teaching 
 his young attendant his a 6, ab. Andrew Melville, 
 amused by the spectacle of the greatest scholar in 
 Europe engaged in so disproportionate a task, made 
 a suitable observation. 'Better this than stealing 
 sheep,' quoth Buchanan, or 'than being idill,' he added,
 
 24 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 which latter he maintained to be as bad as the stealing 
 of sheep. Then the conversation wandered to his 
 History, which was by this time in the hands of the 
 printer. The Melvilles noticed in the proofs the well- 
 known and ugly story of Mary's having got Rizzio's 
 body removed to the tomb of James v. They suggested 
 that the king might take offence at this reflection on 
 his mother's memory, and that the publication might 
 be stopped. 'Tell me,' said the dying historian, 'if 
 it is true.' They said they thought so. 'Then I will 
 bide his feud, and all his kin's,' was the answer. 
 There was, no doubt, a dash of the heroic in this, but 
 there was a chuckle in it too, as the speaker reflected 
 that the king who had neglected him, and whom he 
 had flogged for persistent boyish insolence, according 
 to the pedagogic fashion of the time, would once more 
 have his pride humbled at his hands when he was 
 gone. 
 
 No story was better known in Scotland than his 
 correction of the king, and his now unrepeatable 
 sarcasm in reply to the Countess of Mar's haughty 
 demand how he, a mere man of learning, could dare 
 to lift his hand upon the Lord's anointed. It tickled 
 the popular mind, and along with other reports of 
 Buchanan's fun for it is not to be supposed that his 
 table-talk with the Scaligers, or even with Knox, was
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 25 
 
 wholly funereal in character indeed we know it was 
 not formed a sort of Buchanan myth, to which every 
 witling who thought he had invented a good thing, 
 and wanted to get it listened to by fathering it on a 
 well-known name a device not yet extinct would 
 contribute further bulk, although not more ornament. 
 In this way an idea of Buchanan as a man of mirth 
 and facetiousness l would take root and spread in the 
 public consciousness, and as the people could not get 
 at the real Buchanan for his Latin, they formed a 
 picture of him according to their own uncivilised 
 conceptions. Hence the chapbooks a hideous reflec- 
 tion from a cracked and distorted mirror, but still 
 showing that there was something to reflect. 
 
 Such was Buchanan, political thinker, practical 
 statesman, poet, scholar, historian, controversialist, 
 humorist, and great in all these diverse directions 
 certainly a personality worth knowing in greater detail. 
 
 1 When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the 
 mediaeval chestnut, Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum ? Mensa 
 tantum. (' What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot ? Only the table ') 
 the reply was credited to Buchanan.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 BUCHANAN'S life, like the lives of most people who 
 have done anything worth speaking of in their time, 
 divides itself roughly into two sections the period 
 of preparation, and the period of performance. What 
 I shall call his period of performance, or at all events 
 chief performance, was from the time when he finally 
 returned to Scotland, after an absence abroad, with 
 brief interruptions, of twenty-two years, and spent the 
 remaining twenty-one years of his life in more or less 
 intimate occupation with the public affairs of his 
 country. On the igth of August 1561, Queen Mary, 
 then in her nineteenth year, landed at Leith, and 
 was escorted to Holyrood by her enthusiastic subjects, 
 by whom she was also serenaded at night in a style 
 which, as the queen's French retinue thought, showed 
 more heart than art. Shortly before or after this date, 
 Buchanan, now fifty-five years old, also appeared in 
 Scotland, for his final settlement there. It is a curious 
 
 26
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 27 
 
 coincidence that these two persons, eminent alike in 
 their widely divergent spheres, and destined alternately 
 to a literary friendship that was pleasant to both, and 
 a political antagonism that was fatal to one of them, 
 should have appeared on the scene of their sympathies 
 and conflicts practically at the same time. I have said 
 that the division of Buchanan's life into a period of 
 preparation and a period of performance is a rough 
 division. By that I mean that what really deserves 
 to be called performance could not be absolutely 
 excluded from the preparation period, and that, to 
 some extent, one stage of the performance period was 
 often a preparation for the next ; but taken with this 
 qualification, the division is a sufficiently valid one. 
 
 It was, for instance, mainly during the preparation 
 or foreign period that Buchanan wrote those poems 
 which stamped him not only as a man of wit and 
 poetic genius, but as the first Latin stylist in Europe 
 of his day. During this period, too, he acquired from 
 classic and other sources those broad and compre- 
 hensive ideas on the leading questions of the day 
 which made him the thinker and Humanist as con- 
 trasted with the mere cleric or scholastic obscurantist. 
 It was then also that, through observation on the spot, 
 he was able to comprehend the ' true inwardness ' of 
 the struggle that was going forward between the old
 
 28 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 order of things and the new, and often give practical 
 advice that was useful. In this period, too, he com- 
 pleted that thorough study of the Roman and Protest- 
 ant controversy which ended in determining him to 
 identify himself publicly with the Protestant side in 
 the great conflict that was on foot in itself no incon- 
 siderable event. All this was undoubtedly perform- 
 ance of no mean order, but from the Scottish national 
 point of view, and from the point of view of general 
 history, on which the special Scottish history exerted 
 so profound an influence, it was preparatory to the 
 great work he did in his native land. His Latin and 
 his various Continental activities are forgotten, but his 
 Scottish work is still memorable. Yet it was because 
 he was the great Humanist and unequalled Latinist, 
 as well as the thinker and experienced observer of 
 affairs, that he was able to command the ear of learned 
 and diplomatic Europe, and through them to make 
 the events that were happening in his country a factor 
 in the world's history. His foreign performance was 
 therefore, in reality, a preparation for his crowning 
 performance at home. I shall not labour the point 
 of one stage of his performance being preparatory to 
 another. 
 
 Of course I do not mean to say that Buchanan did 
 all this consciously and systematically; that he deliber-
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 29 
 
 ately prepared abroad, and then came and deliber- 
 ately performed at home. Few men, especially men 
 of Buchanan's type, shape their lives on such lines of 
 exact and exhaustive purpose. I leave out of account 
 the unhappily large class who foolishly, and even 
 wickedly, throw away their lives, and have hardly ever 
 tried or desired to make a better of it. I confine 
 myself to those who do get something out of life for 
 themselves or society, or both. But I doubt if any, 
 beyond a small minority even of this class, begin life 
 with a distinct aim at reaching what they end life by 
 becoming. There is, of course, the famous case of 
 Whittington, who set himself in cold blood to become 
 Lord Mayor of London. But for one Whittington 
 there have been centuries of Lord Mayors who never 
 dreamt of the Mansion House when they started 
 business in the City. The glory and the turtle came 
 upon them, virtually unsolicited ; and even Whitting- 
 ton would probably not have addressed himself as he 
 did to his high achievement, had it not been for the 
 unique campanula of inspiration caught by his ear 
 alone. Probably Napoleon early laid his plans for 
 attaining the mastership of France, possibly of Europe ; 
 but did Caesar begin life with a determination to 
 conquer Rome and become its dictator, or Cromwell 
 with a sketch-plan for cutting off his king's head,
 
 30 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 cashiering his country's parliament, and making himself 
 Lord Protector and military despot ? 
 
 Millionaires are seldom so of set design. They 
 begin, most probably, by aiming at a competent for- 
 tune, but having got that length, the acquired delight in 
 pulling the strings of an extensive and possibly adven- 
 turous undertaking, and not mere miserly greed, has 
 kept them at a task which they find they can perform, 
 until the millions roll in as a justification of their ideas 
 and processes. In politics and the professions men 
 probably set out with a general aim at the best position 
 and the most money they can make for themselves ; but 
 very few, I should imagine, of those who have reached 
 the greatest eminence or prosperity possible to them 
 said in their youth, ' I mean to be Prime Minister, or 
 Lord Chancellor, or Archbishop of Canterbury, or 
 President of the Royal College of Physicians, or of the 
 Royal Academy.' Buchanan seems to have belonged 
 to a type of character which does not include either of 
 the classes of persons just considered. Neither cupidity 
 nor ambition nor any of the ordinary self-aggrandising 
 motives seems to have had much, if any, place in his 
 character. Apostrophising Buchanan in his Funeral 
 Elegy, Joseph Scaliger says : 
 
 ' Contemptis opibus, spretis popularibus auris, 
 Ventosaeque fugax ambitionis, obis.'
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 31 
 
 'Despising wealth, spurning the mob's applause, and 
 shunning vain ambition, thou passest away.' 
 
 This was literally true. Buchanan lived from hand 
 to mouth during the greater part of his career. But 
 there is no evidence that he ever tried to make a 
 fortune. He might have prospered in the Church, as 
 Dunbar was willing to do. But he had ideas of his 
 own on that subject, and neither gold nor dignities 
 could tempt him to sell his soul. 
 
 Begging Letter-Writer 
 
 He was often ' hard up,' but it does not appear to 
 have depressed his spirits. Indeed, he is never 
 sprightlier, more epigrammatically witty, or more 
 genially humorous than when he is what some of 
 us might call ' begging ' from some wealthy friend who 
 could appreciate his genius and accomplishments. 
 Here, for instance, is a ' begging letter ' to Queen 
 Mary, in the days when they were still friends, and 
 read Livy, and doubtless indulged in fencing-matches 
 of wit together : 
 
 ' Do quod adest : opto quod abest tibi : dona darentur 
 
 Aurea, sors animo si foret aequa meo. 
 Hoc leve si credis, paribus me ulciscere donis : 
 Et quod abest, opta tu mihi : da quod adest.' 
 
 Which may be literally, or nearly so, according ' to the
 
 32 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 best of my knowledge and belief,' as the affidavits 
 say: 
 
 ' To you I give what I do have : for you I wish what you 
 
 don't have : 
 Golden, indeed, would be my gifts, were Fortune equal 
 
 to my will. 
 If you should chance to think this levity, in equal levities 
 
 have your revenge : 
 For me wish you what I don't have : to me give you 
 
 what you do have.' 
 
 Dr. Hume Brown puts it neatly into rhyme thus : 
 
 ' I give you what I have : I wish you what you lack : 
 And weightier were my gift, were fortune at my back. 
 Perchance you think I jest ? A like jest then I crave : 
 Wish for me what I lack, and give me what you have.' 
 
 Take another in the same strain : 
 
 ' Ad Jacobum, Moravise Comitem. 
 ' Si magis est, ut Christus ait, donare beatum, 
 
 Quam de munifica dona referre manu : 
 Aspice quam faveam tibi : sis ut dando beatus, 
 Non renuo fieri, te tribuente, miser.' 
 
 ' To James, Earl of Moray. 
 
 ' If, as Christ says, it is more blessed to give than to re- 
 ceive gifts from a munificent hand, just see what a favour I 
 am doing you : that you may be blessed in giving, I am 
 ready to play miserable receiver to your happy donor.' 
 
 Or, to cite Dr. Brown again :
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 33 
 
 ' It is more blest, saith Holy Writ, to give than to receive : 
 How great, then, is your debt to me, who take whate'er 
 you give ! ' 
 
 With equally humorous familiarity he sends in an 
 application, 'Ad Matthaeum Leviniae Comitem, Scotise 
 Proregem ' (To Matthew, Earl of Lennox, Regent of 
 Scotland '). I quote only the concluding couplet : 
 
 ' Denique da quidvis, podagram modo deprecor unam : 
 Munus erit medicis aptius ilia suis.' 
 
 That is 
 
 ' To be brief, give me whatever you like only, not your 
 gout. That will be a more appropriate fee for the doctors 
 who are trying to cure it.' 
 
 Or to fall back on Dr. Brown's translation once more : 
 
 ' Since I am poor and you are rich, what happy chance is 
 
 thine ! 
 My modest wishes, too, you know one nugget from your 
 
 mine ! 
 
 Only, whatever be your gift, let it not be your gout : 
 That, a meet present for your leech, 1 5 d rather go without.' 
 
 These are merely samples of many communications, 
 similar in object and style, which he addressed, at 
 various periods of his life, to quarters where he thought 
 they would not be ill-taken. As a rule, he supported 
 himself by ' regenting ' in colleges, or acting as tutor in 
 royal or noble families. It was only when he could 
 
 C
 
 34 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 not make a better of it that he asked Society, through 
 its most likely magnates, to give him something ' to go 
 on with.' What else could he do? Carlyle's descrip- 
 tion of Thackeray as ' writing for his life ' could never 
 have applied to Buchanan. Literature was not yet a 
 profession or ' bread-study.' It was not till next 
 century that Milton got ^5 for Paradise Lost; and 
 even Shakespeare made his money less as a writer 
 than as a showman. The idea of Buchanan or 
 Erasmus a much more importunate beggar than 
 Buchanan going into business, say the wine or the 
 wool trade, would have been absurd. They would 
 have ruined any house that adopted them in two or 
 three years, to say nothing of the indecency of allow- 
 ing intellectual leaders of high genius to be lost in 
 work which could be much better done by humbler 
 men. There was nothing else for it, in Buchanan's 
 case, but to do as he did. 
 
 Of course, in this age of contract and commerce, we 
 are apt to associate an idea of meanness and pitifulness 
 with the conduct of Buchanan and Erasmus and others 
 in this matter. Our first feeling is that nobody should 
 give any other body anything except according to 
 bargain. Every man should be independent, and if 
 he asks anything outside a contract, he might as well 
 go bankrupt at once. He must clearly be a weakling,
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 35 
 
 and the weak must go to the wall. The feudal senti- 
 ment, however, amidst which Buchanan lived, was 
 entirely different, and had a nobler side than ours, 
 although one does not want feudalism back merely on 
 that account. Kings and lords took everything to 
 themselves, in the shape of power and possession, that 
 they could lay their hands on ; but it was on the 
 understanding that they were to make a generous use 
 of what they had appropriated. Noblesse oblige was 
 still a maxim with vitality in it. The right men 
 acknowledged it, and acted on it ; the ruffians, as their 
 manner is, wherever they are placed in life, ignored it. 
 Patronage was not an act of grace : it was a duty. It 
 was part of the honourable service to society, by which 
 the patron's tenure of his prosperity was conditioned. 
 More particularly must this duty have been recognised 
 by right-minded possessors of power and wealth who 
 had felt the influence of the Renaissance, that mighty 
 and far-reaching effort of the human intellect to assert 
 its freedom and its varied energies against the narrow- 
 ing and obscurantist influences of scholasticism, re- 
 duced to its then existing state of enslavement, often 
 against its better knowledge and attempts at self- 
 emancipation, by Ecclesiastical authority, wielding the 
 weapon of Papal and Conciliar decree, sanctioned by 
 fire and faggot.
 
 3 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Then there was still the tradition of hospitality which 
 the Old Church, with all its faults, had kept up. In 
 these contractual days of ours, there is very little 
 hospitality, as it was defined by the Author of 
 Christianity. A modern dinner is generally a meet- 
 ing of creditors, or a combination of clever or stupid 
 epicureans, the better to amuse or otherwise enjoy 
 themselves, according to their tastes in meat and 
 drink, or even conversation. It is often a case of 
 undisguised ' treating ' on the part of the so-called host, 
 who wants to use his so-called guests for a purpose, 
 and whose performance might very appropriately go 
 into a schedule to some of the Bribery and Corruption 
 Acts. But in the days of the Old Church, a wandering 
 or needy scholar would have been welcomed at many, 
 if not all, of the religious houses, and treated on a very 
 different footing from our applicants for relief at the 
 casual wards of one of our workhouses, probably 
 the only institution resembling Christian hospitality 
 authorised by modern organised society. 
 
 This latter may be a better arrangement, for anything 
 I know to the contrary. All I say is that it is different 
 from what was recognised in Buchanan's day. It 
 would never occur to Buchanan that he was doing 
 anything inconsistent with self-respect in putting his 
 position before people like Queen Mary, or Moray, or
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 37 
 
 Lennox, and asking their temporary aid or a per- 
 manent office. They had taken over the wealth of 
 the religious houses; did not their hospitalities pass 
 with it? They had divided up the country among 
 themselves and others; were they not honourably 
 bound to see that a great civilising force like Buchanan 
 was not extinguished ? Besides, he understood his own 
 value. A man is not six feet six inches high without 
 being aware of it. He knew what he was, and what 
 he had made himself, and what he was worth, and 
 that he was giving as good as he was getting, or 
 likely to get. In those days a great master of the 
 New Learning was an object of the highest admira- 
 tion, as a sort of intellectual Magician. Moreover, 
 he was a power, in as far as he was a leader of 
 contemporary thought and learning. 
 
 In these respects Buchanan was an invaluable 
 acquisition to persons like Mary, or Moray, or 
 Lennox, or Knox, who must have winked at a good 
 deal in Buchanan, which he would not have stood 
 in a less potent ally. In his prime, and even until 
 his death, no one had an equal command over the 
 universal ear of cultured Europe. To the rulers of 
 his time he was worth what, say, fifty friendly editors 
 of newspapers including the Times and all the six- 
 penny weeklies, as far as they are worth anything
 
 38 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 would be to a politician of to-day. To Queen Mary 
 especially, with her refined intellectual tastes and 
 her ambition to be a figure in the world, it was no 
 small matter to have the greatest and most brilliant 
 scholar-poet of the day as a part of her court, whether 
 he read Livy and exchanged wit with herself, or 
 officiated as her poet-laureate on great occasions. 
 As a mere ornament he was worth a considerable 
 fraction of her best diamond necklace. 
 
 I am dwelling on this point because it will save 
 time and trouble afterwards, and accordingly I ask 
 further if Edie Ochiltree, in later times, and in a less 
 feudalistic state of public sentiment, could beg round 
 the district, without loss of respect, on the strength of 
 his badge and uniform, testifying to past good service 
 in his time and station, why should not an eminent 
 public servant like Buchanan, in a totally different 
 state of general feeling on such matters, ask society, 
 through representatives of it who, he knew, should 
 not and would not treat him roughly, to help him 
 in prosecuting his shining and useful career? He 
 had done a good work on the High Street of the 
 World. He had sung it a song or played it a melody 
 such as it would hear nowhere else. Was he not 
 entitled to send round his hat among the listeners? 
 Is it not what is done by every book-writer of to-day,
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 39 
 
 who, when the last page is finished, sends out a con- 
 federate in the shape of a publisher to canvass the 
 public for a consideration with the book in one 
 hand and the hat in the other? Is it not what is 
 done, inter alia, by every Parliamentary lawyer, who 
 goes into the House of Commons to grind his axe, 
 when the fitting occasion arises, and he says to his 
 party leader, ' I have fought two general elections for 
 you. I have spoken for you unnumbered times in the 
 House and on the platform. I have voted for you, 
 up hill and down .dale, through thick and thin, right or 
 wrong, and now I will trouble you for that Chancellor - 
 ship, or that Chief-Justiceship, or that Attorney- 
 Generalship, or that Puisne or County Court Judgeship 
 that has just fallen vacant'? Except that Buchanan 
 and his work were not shams, but realities, the cases 
 are the same. 
 
 Buchanan's enemies say that in accepting mainten- 
 ance or preferment he sold his independence to the 
 donors, and when it is answered that he showed any- 
 thing but want of independence in the case of Queen 
 Mary and others, whom he subsequently came to 
 oppose in the public interest, they tack about and 
 accuse him of the basest ingratitude in biting the 
 hand that fed him, as they put it. It is as if in these 
 days Sir Gorgias Midas, M.P., were to say to some
 
 40 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 editor who had noticed a speech of his unfavourably, 
 ' Ungrateful scribbler, have I not, over and over again, 
 dined you and wined you with the best that larder and 
 cellar can produce, and do you now turn and rend 
 me?' There have been editors who would have 
 answered, ' Presumptuous moneybag, I suppose I paid 
 fully for my dinner with my company, and I am 
 perfectly free to criticise you as you deserve.' 
 Buchanan stood equally free in his relations to his 
 patrons. From the personal point of view, whether 
 his connection were regarded as an ornament, a 
 pleasure, or a utility, his alliance was worth his sub- 
 sidy. From the public point of view it was their 
 duty, as trustees for the public property and progress, 
 to maintain a great civiliser like Buchanan in a 
 position where his powers had scope, while it was 
 Buchanan's privilege and duty to exercise his creative 
 and critical capacities in the public interest without 
 fear or favour. And this, as will be seen, is what 
 Buchanan substantially did. Knox and Melville 
 repeatedly reminded Queen Mary and King James 
 that there was another kingdom in the realm besides 
 theirs the kingdom of Christ, to wit and suggested, 
 or rather demanded, that their Majesties should not 
 meddle with officials of this spiritual kingdom like 
 themselves, the said Knox and Melville. This claim
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 41 
 
 they rested on a supernatural, and therefore disputable, 
 basis. But there could be nothing disputable about 
 the ground Buchanan stood on. He too was a 
 potentate of the intellect ; a king of thought, learning, 
 and poetic might, and in that dominion, when it was 
 necessary, bore himself with a courage and independ- 
 ence that have not always been successfully reproduced 
 by his successors, when confronted with the monarchies 
 and lordships of material power and glory. 
 
 No Notoriety Hunter 
 
 This discussion arose in our endeavour to determine 
 Buchanan's character so far as money-making was 
 concerned. He was no money-maker. Contemptis 
 opibus ' despising wealth ' is, as we have seen, Joseph 
 Scaliger's account of him, meaning thereby that per- 
 sonally he did not care for more money than would 
 maintain the much other than money-making career 
 which he liked, and had set his heart on, keeping 
 himself independent by the labour of a scholar, but not 
 hesitating to ask payment, when he wanted it, from 
 a society that was morally indebted to him. His 
 indifference, however, to wealth as a life-object must 
 not be confounded with the counsel of the ascetic 
 preacher who urges his hearers to forget the present
 
 42 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 world in thoughts of the world to come, and wins, 
 perhaps, a better living by an eloquent and pessimistic 
 sermon on the text which says that ' the love of money 
 is the root of all evil.' There is nothing to show that 
 Buchanan did not hold, with all sensible people, that 
 there is a sense in which the love of money is the root 
 of all good, inasmuch as it is the men of strong 
 cupidity who organise industry and commerce, thereby 
 laying that foundation of material wealth without 
 which there can be no superstructure of leisured 
 thought, learning, or art, acting, it may be, only as 
 the dray-horses of civilisation some of them, of 
 course, are a good deal more but worthy of all the 
 corn they consume, although were one desirous of 
 exchanging ideas, it would not be to their sumptuous 
 stables that he would resort. 
 
 Neither does he appear to have set his heart upon 
 the ordinary objects of ambition, in the shape of fame 
 or power. ' Dear is fame to the rhyming tribe.' ' That 
 dearest wish of every poetic bosom to be distin- 
 guished,' said Burns in his preface to the first edition 
 of his poems, and he, if any one, was entitled to speak. 
 But in the same preface he also says that to amuse 
 himself amidst toil, to transcribe the feelings in his 
 own breast, to find some counterpoise to the struggles 
 of a world alien and uncouth to the poetic mind ' these
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 43 
 
 were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these 
 he found Poetry to be its own reward.' In other words, 
 the poet may desire fame and distinction for what he 
 has done, yet it need not have been the desire of fame 
 and distinction that made him do it. Buchanan seems 
 to have been even more self-controlled or more in- 
 different than this account of matters might imply. 
 His numerous efforts had won him the highest reputa- 
 tion, but he had taken no pains to advertise himself. 
 He had handed his productions here and there to 
 friends who wished to see them, and it was only the 
 solicitation of those friends that prevented his consign- 
 ing to everlasting obscurity some of the brightest 
 things he, or indeed any one else, ever wrote. 
 
 His most famous production as a poet, his version 
 of the Hebrew Psalms, or rather series of poems based 
 upon these, was certainly not written for fame. Every 
 Humanist of eminence was expected to try his hand 
 upon the Psalms, and when Buchanan found himself 
 in Portugal under lock and key, at the instance of the 
 Inquisition, among a set of monks, whom he hits off 
 as equally good-natured and ignorant, and who had 
 been told off to instruct him in orthodoxy, he addressed 
 himself to a classic rendering of the Psalms with the 
 double purpose of discharging his duty by his Human- 
 istic Vocation, and doing something that might redeem
 
 44 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 his time and his temper from the boredom of the un- 
 congenial society amidst which misfortune had placed 
 him. There does not seem in all this much of that 
 passionate desire of distinction to which Burns con- 
 fesses. It is said, however, that fame was his object 
 in commencing and carrying on his poem on the Sphere, 
 which was undoubtedly planned on an elaborate and 
 extensive scale. If fame was his desire, it was not a 
 very consuming one, for he was five-and-twenty years 
 at least over it, and left it unfinished at last, although 
 goaded by friends to hasten its production. 
 
 What does he say on the matter himself? Writing 
 to Tycho Brahe in 1576, six years before his death, 
 and more than twenty after he began to work at the 
 Sphere, he says that bad health had compelled him, 
 spem scribendi carminis in posterum penitus abjicere, 
 ' completely to abandon the hope of writing a poem for 
 posterity.' Three years afterwards, writing to a literary 
 friend in England, who, like many others, kept dun- 
 ning him for his promised books, and even for 'copy,' 
 he says, with respect to his 'astronomical' aims in 
 poetry, he had not so much voluntarily abandoned 
 them, as been obliged reluctantly to submit to the 
 deprivation of them ; neque enim aut nunc libet nugari, 
 cut si maxime vellem per atatem licet. Accessit eo 
 histories scribenda labor, 'for neither am I now greatly
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 45 
 
 disposed for mere trifling, nor, were I never so much 
 disposed, will my years allow it. Then in addition to 
 my other difficulties there is the labour of writing my 
 History'', the plain meaning being that as his years 
 forbade him to do both the History and the Sphere, he 
 elected to go on with the History and give up the 
 Sphere, as a form of nugari or 'dilettantism.' 
 
 All this does not look very like a burning eagerness 
 for posthumous fame, at all events of the kind that 
 moves a certain class of people to leave money for 
 hospitals, or almshouses, or learned foundations, to 
 perpetuate names that would otherwise never have 
 risen out of obscurity or escaped oblivion. As a 
 matter of fact, Buchanan knew that he was cele- 
 brated, but no one had a poorer opinion of the work / 
 that had won him reputation than he had himself, 
 not from the modesty of merit, as the common form 
 carelessly puts it, but from the consciousness of merit, 
 and because he felt that it was in him to do better. 
 He hated the idea of having more celebrity than he 
 deserved, and wanted to produce something that would 
 show he was not an impostor or a quack. In short, he 
 did not want more fame, but what he thought a better 
 and honester title to the fame he had. That, however, 
 is not the passion for fame, but simply self-respect, and 
 an unselfish anxiety for the good name of those friends
 
 46 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 who had staked their reputation for taste and judgment 
 on his ability for turning out the highest class of work. 
 This is not the love of glory, but something better, 
 although even if it were, it would not necessarily be 
 either weak or wrong, provided the subject of it knew 
 what he was doing in giving a rational scope to a 
 natural impulse, and that he could and would give 
 humanity something worth the prize of its praise. 
 
 Buchanan himself tells us why he gave up the Sphere 
 and took up the History. It was primarily to gratify 
 his friends, who thought that such a work was a want of 
 the time, more useful and more suitable to Buchanan's 
 years than poetry; while he himself assures us, and 
 there is no reason to doubt his declaration, that he 
 desired to set before his royal pupil, James vi., the 
 warnings and the encouragements derivable from the 
 story of his predecessors on the throne, including his 
 own ill-advised and ill-fated mother. It was no fault 
 of Buchanan's if James despised his teacher's counsel, 
 and, listening to flatterers, took up with the Divine 
 Right doctrine, by impressing which on his unhappy 
 son, both through precept and example, he virtually 
 destined him to jump the life to come from the 
 scaffold of Whitehall. 
 
 Buchanan's friends seem to have tried to tempt him 
 to undertake the History by representing that no sub-
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 47 
 
 ject was aut uberius ad laudem, aut firmius ad memories 
 conservandam diuturnitatem, ' better fitted to win him 
 renown or prolong his memory.' It is not on the 
 strength of such hopes, however, that he describes 
 himself as working. It was, by his own account, only 
 the shame of leaving unfinished a task he had engaged 
 himself to his friends to perform that made him per- 
 severe at a labour which, he says, in cetate Integra 
 -bermolestus, nunc vero in hac meditatione mortis, inter 
 mortalitatis metum, et desinendi pudorem, non potest non 
 lentus esse et ingratus, quando nee cessare licet, nee pro- 
 gredi lubet, ' would, even in the flower of my age, have 
 been a burden, but now, in contemplation of my end, 
 what between the dread of death interrupting me before 
 I am done, and the shame there would be in abandon- 
 ing my undertaking, I neither find myself free to stop, 
 nor feel any pleasure in going on.' Not much there of 
 glory for himself, although something of an heroic 
 devotion to the claims of friendship and the call of 
 duty !
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS (continued} 
 
 Did not seek power 
 
 SCALIGER'S ascription to Buchanan of a spirit superior 
 to the temptations of wealth and fame seems thus 
 fairly well justified ; but what of his further claim that 
 he was insensible to ambition? He rose to be the 
 foremost Latin poet and man of letters, or indeed poet 
 and man of letters of any kind in his day, and to the 
 highest positions, political, ecclesiastical, educational, 
 in his native land. Did he reach all this without 
 aiming at it ? Did it all come upon him unsolicited ? 
 Substantially, it would seem, that was so. The key to 
 his plan of life, I believe, is to be found in the beginning 
 <- of the short autobiography which he wrote (1580) in 
 the third person, two years before his death, not from 
 motives of egotism, but at the request of friends. 
 He is stating how he came to be sent to the University 
 of Paris when about fourteen, and then he says, ibi 
 cum studiis literarum, maxime carminibus scribendis, 
 
 48
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 49 
 
 operam dedisset, partim natura impulsu, partim neces- 
 sitate (quod hoc ununt studiorum genus adolescentia 
 proponebatur\ etc., ' devoting himself there to literary 
 studies, and chiefly to writing verses, partly from natural 
 impulse and partly from necessity, that being the only 
 sort of study open to youthful learners.' 
 
 That is really Buchanan in a nutshell. He followed 
 the bent of his genius, and did not pick and choose his 
 work, but performed, to the best of his ability, the task 
 placed before him by Destiny. He lived up to his 
 nature and his Fate, did with his might what his hand 
 found to do, then took up the next undertaking that 
 came along, and handled it in the same fashion. He 
 waited upon 'time and the hour' rather than sought 
 to force its hand a very good way, if not indeed the 
 best way, to confront life and its problems, for those 
 who are wise enough and strong enough to do it. He 
 made himself master of the spirit, ideas, and style of 
 the great writers and thinkers of classic antiquity, be- 
 cause it was the work that lay nearest to his hand, and 
 because he liked it passionately and could not rest 
 until it was all and easily his own, and not because he 
 thought he could make it pay, whether in money or 
 reputation, or both. Except in the case of the unlucky 
 and unfinished Sphere, he did not sit down to compose 
 poetry deliberately and in cold blood, at the rate of so 
 
 D
 
 50 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 many scores or hundreds of lines before breakfast or 
 dinner, as certain ' poets ' are said to have done, or do. 
 His best work of this kind was struck out of him like 
 
 X the fire from the flint, by the demand of the occasion, 
 or the suggestion of friends, or an inspiration or impulse 
 that came upon him at the moment. 
 
 It was the request of James v. (1537) that led to his 
 becoming the most powerful satirist of his time and 
 country, much above Lyndsay, at least on a level with 
 Dunbar, and second only to Burns. His 'Psalms' 
 5 were written (1550-51) to kill time while imprisoned 
 in a Portuguese monastery. His Elegies, Epigrams, 
 
 ^ Tragedies, Masques, Addresses (1530-66) were thrown 
 off in answer to the call of the moment and the circum- 
 stances. The Detectio Regina (1569-7 1) was composed 
 at the desire of the great anti-despotic and reforming 
 party to which he belonged. The ' Admonition to the 
 Trew Lordis ' and the ( Chameleon ' were political tracts 
 for the times designed to stimulate the flagging zeal of 
 the friends of freedom. The De Jure (1570-79) was 
 inspired by a present and a foreseen necessity of making 
 Liberty impregnable as against the reactionaries of 
 Absolutism. The History was undertaken and com- 
 pleted (1569-82) less for a scientific than for a patriotic 
 and politico-paideutic purpose, to set his country and 
 its constitution in a true light before the world, and to
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 51 
 
 help in moulding its future king into the constitutional 
 ruler of a free people. 
 
 He held many appointments, and executed many 
 commissions, not a few of them of the highest re- 
 sponsibility and dignity, but most of them sought him, 
 not he them. Lord Cassilis had him for tutor-com- 
 panion (1532-37). King James v. engaged him as 
 tutor for one of his children (1538-39). The King of 
 Portugal employed him to aid in founding and conduct- 
 ing his College at Coimbra, and did his best, though 
 in vain, to retain him in his kingdom (1547-52). The 
 famous Marechal de Brissac chose him to mould the 
 mind of his son, and sometimes had him at a Council 
 of War (1555-60). Queen Mary attached him to her 
 Court, and as we have seen, read Livy with him, and, 
 no doubt, much else (1562). The General Assembly 
 of the Reformed Church of Scotland chose him, though 
 a layman, as their Moderator (1567), he having already 
 sat four years as a member and aided them in drawing 
 up their First Book of Discipline. He was appointed 
 by Regent Moray Principal of St. Leonard's College, 
 St. Andrews (1566), to reorganise its curriculum and 
 constitution. He was selected as Secretary to the 
 Commission sent by the Scots Government to deal 
 with the high questions at issue between Queens 
 Elizabeth and Mary (1568-69). The Scots Parliament
 
 52 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 chose him to the extremely responsible office of Tutor 
 to the youthful King James vi. (1570), and continued 
 him in that position nominally until his death (1582). 
 He sat as a member of the Scots Parliament (1570-78) 
 in virtue of his keepership of the Privy Seal, and did 
 secretarial work for it, which nobody else was qualified 
 to do, while at the same time assisting the General 
 Assembly in revising their Book of 'Policy.' This 
 keepership he may have solicited he subsequently 
 resigned it although there is no proof of that, but all 
 the other appointments came to him, and engaged his 
 best ability as they passed him in procession. 
 
 Sir James Melville backs Scaliger 
 
 This view of Buchanan's character and scheme of 
 life is confirmed by the remarkable and elaborate 
 account of him given, in his own Memoirs, by Sir 
 James Melville of Halhill (1545-1617), a professional 
 courtier and diplomatist who had served on the Con- 
 tinent in important missions and affairs, and had been 
 a confidential servant both to Queen Mary and her son 
 James vi. He is describing the guardians of the boy- 
 king at Stirling (1570-78), and after having highly 
 eulogised the Governor, he proceeds : ' The Laird 
 of Dromwhassel, his Maiestie's maister of houshald, 
 was ambitious and greedy, and had gretest cair how
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 53 
 
 till advance himself and his friendis. The twa abbots 
 [Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh] were wyse and modest; 
 my Lady Mar was wyse and schairp, and held \t.e. kept] 
 the King in great aw ; and sa did Mester George 
 Buchwhennen. Mester Peter Young 1 was gentiller, 
 and was laith till offend the King at any tym, and used 
 himself wairily, as a man that had mynd of his awin 
 weill, be keeping of his Maiestie's favour. Bot Mester 
 George was a stoik philosopher, and looked not far 
 before the hand; a man of notable qualities for his 
 learning and knawledge in Latin poesie, mekle maid 
 accompt of in other contrees, plaisant in company, 
 rehersing at all occasions moralities short and fecfull, 
 whereof he had aboundance, and invented wher he 
 wanted. 
 
 1 He was also of gud religion for a poet, bot he was 
 easily abused, and sa facill that he was led with any 
 company that he hanted for the tyme, quhilk maid him 
 factious in his auld dayes; for he spak and wret as 
 they that wer about him for the tym infourmed him. 
 For he was become sleperie and cairles, and followed in 
 many thingis the vulgair oppinion, for he was naturally 
 populaire, and extrem vengeable against any man that 
 had offendit him, quhilk was his gretest fault. For he 
 
 1 He was Buchanan's assistant, and called the king's ' Pedagogue, ' 
 Buchanan being called ' Master. '
 
 54 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 wret dispytfull invectives against the Erie of Monteith, 
 for some particulaires that was between him and the 
 Laird of Buchwhennen ; and became the Erie of 
 Morton's gret ennemy, for ane hackney of his that 
 chancit to be tane fra his saru[v]and during the civil 
 troubles, and was bocht be the Regent; wha had na 
 will to part with the said horse, he was sa sur of foot 
 and sa easy, that albeit Mester George had oft tymes 
 requyred him again, he culd not get him, and wher he 
 had bene the Regentis gret frend of before, he becam 
 his deadly ennemy, and spak evil of him fra that tym 
 fourth in all places and at all occasions. Dromwhassel 
 also, because the Regent kepit all the casualtes 1 to him- 
 self, and wald let nathing fall till v[u]thers that wer 
 about the King, becam also his ennemy, and sa did 
 they all that wer about his Maiestie.' 
 
 Melville was scarcely the man to take the measure 
 of Buchanan on the more important side of his 
 character, but he may be trusted to have given an 
 honest view of him according to his lights which, in 
 some serious respects, were darkness as well as of 
 the impression which Buchanan had made on better 
 judges of remarkable men than was the worthy Sir 
 
 1 Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case 
 the king) ; which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed 
 casualties.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 55 
 
 James himself. The latter's preface is a charming 
 piece of naivete. He tells us that though a courtier 
 he had dealt faithfully and not flatteringly with 
 'princes,' but had not found it a paying procedure, 
 and hints that if he had it to do over again, he 
 might sail on the opposite tack. He had advised 
 the Laird of Carmichael to do so, who profited 
 greatly by the advice, both for himself and his friends, 
 but did not show much gratitude to his counsellor, as 
 the latter complains rather unreasonably, one would 
 say, since, if you corrupt a man's morale^ you must 
 not be disappointed if he treats you accordingly. 
 Perhaps Sir James recovers his honest standing by 
 the honest simplicity with which he confesses his 
 leanings to dishonesty, like the M. de Bussy whom 
 he quotes as also bewailing, too late, the honesty of 
 his courtier career, but excusing himself on the ground 
 that he could not help it, as it was his ' nature to.' 
 
 All the more trustworthy, however, is probably the 
 distinction Sir James draws between Peter Young and 
 Buchanan. ' Mester Peter ' was evidently no Nathanael 
 in his critic's view, and his subsequent good fortune, 
 as attested by history, shows that his character had 
 been accurately enough diagnosed. There is no 
 reason to doubt, accordingly, that Sir James is equally 
 correct in describing Buchanan as one who 'looked
 
 $6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 not far before the hand.' That is, he was not a cal- 
 culating person, and set his duties above his interests ; 
 did his work to the best of his ability, and took his 
 reward if, as, and when it came, but was really less 
 anxious about securing the reward than about doing 
 the work as it ought to be done. 
 
 A Faithful Mentor 
 
 His whole connection with James makes this plain. 
 It begins with his Genethliacon or Birthday Ode, in 
 which, after apostrophising the infant prince as the 
 hope of all who desired the unity and consequent 
 tranquillity of the two kingdoms, he addresses the 
 felices felici prole parentes ('parents to be felicitated on 
 an offspring born to a felicitous career'), and under 
 guise of a sketch, in verse of Virgilian elevation and 
 beauty, of the standard of character up to which they 
 should train their child, lays down with ' faithful ' out- 
 spokenness the lines of duty on which their own lives 
 should run, and warns them of the ruin which neglect 
 of his counsel would bring. It is not, except in style, 
 a courtly production. Darnley probably could not, 
 but Mary certainly both could and would see the 
 poet's drift, and happy would it have been for both 
 had they avoided the faults against which the poet 
 directed his pointed admonition.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 57 
 
 If James turned out 'the wisest fool in Christen- 
 dom,' the folly was not the fault of Buchanan, but 
 of James's nature, and perhaps also of flatterers of 
 the ' Mester Peter Young ' order, who scattered tares 
 among the wheat of the more worthy sower. At all 
 events he made James a scholar, if the latter made 
 himself a pedant; and this implied, in the circum- 
 stances and the particular case, an exercise of firm 
 and even stern discipline of which a famous if not 
 quite elegant instance has been quoted above, and 
 which was better fitted to improve the morale of the 
 pupil than the fortunes of the disciplinarian. As 
 Melville puts it, Buchanan 'held the king in awe,' 
 an awe which James felt and resented to the last, 
 although, to do him justice, he also plumed himself 
 on his training by an unrivalled scholar. Three works 
 remarkable for their political teaching his Baptistes, 
 his De Jure Rcgni, and his History Buchanan dedi- 
 cated to James, in prefaces as remarkable as the works 
 themselves. All three books were mainly, the second 
 entirely, motived by the idea which Buchanan seems 
 to have regarded as constituting and directing his true 
 mission in life, namely, the unspeakable value of 
 liberty, the constant possibility and deadly evil of 
 tyranny, and the corresponding and always pressing 
 duty of forestalling this possibility and resisting
 
 5 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 this evil by abundant proclamation and practice of 
 the doctrine that legitimate political sovereignty exists 
 only for the good and by the will of the people a 
 principle, of course, entirely subversive of the despotic 
 doctrine of the Divine right of kings, so prevalent 
 in usurpationist quarters in that day, and anticipatory 
 of the modern and accepted democratic ' platform ' of 
 ' Government of the People, by the People, for the 
 People.' 
 
 This is not the stage at which to describe the books 
 themselves it is their prefaces that make them rele- 
 vant at present, but a word to indicate their general 
 character is necessary. The Baptistes was written 
 (1540-41) when Buchanan was comparatively a young 
 man, thirty-four or thirty-five, and was 'regenting' 
 in a great secondary school or gymnasium at Bordeaux, 
 called the College de Guyenne, organised and presided 
 over by one Andre de Gouvea, a famous Portuguese 
 Humanist and educator of the day. This Baptistes 
 was simply a dramatic reproduction of the story of 
 John the Baptist and his tragic end, the dramatis 
 persona being King Herod, Queen Herodias, the 
 latter's dancing daughter, Malchus the high priest, 
 Gamaliel, and the unlucky John himself. It was 
 composed, Buchanan tells us in the dedicatory pre- 
 face and in his autobiography (1574), in accordance
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 59 
 
 with the rules of the college, and intended by him 
 to win the students, who acted it, from the silly 
 ' mysteries ' of the monks to the imitation of classic 
 antiquity, and the rising study of religion in its 
 original documents. But there was something more 
 intended. It is scarcely necessary to read 'between 
 the lines ' to find a complete condemnation of absolu- 
 tist tyranny, and a picture of the misery which it 
 brings on the tyrant himself as well as on his victims. 
 This was not the kind of writing to please monarchs of 
 the period. Nevertheless Buchanan dedicates it (1576) 
 to the boy-king, as 'having a peculiar appositeness 
 to his position,' warning him of 'the agonisings and 
 wretchedness which await tyrants, even when they seem 
 to be most flourishing outwardly.' 
 
 This lesson, he goes on to say, he thinks ' not only 
 useful, but absolutely essential,' for his royal pupil to 
 learn now, so that he may 'early begin to hate' a 
 fault which 'he ought always to shun.' Moreover, 
 he ' wishes to place it on record, for the information 
 of posterity, that if the king should in the future, at 
 the instigation of evil advisers, or by allowing the 
 lust of power to overcome the principles of his educa- 
 tion, act contrary to the warnings now given him, 
 the blame must be laid, not on his teachers, but on 
 himself, in not having listened to those who gave
 
 60 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 him good counsel.' This was not the language of 
 flattery; and though James was only ten when he was 
 thus addressed, the precocity of his intelligence would 
 enable him to understand its import. He was destined, 
 in a very few years, to be king in fact as he was 
 now in name, and Buchanan knew that if his charge 
 turned out other than he was trying to make him 
 what actually happened his own plain speaking would 
 not be to his advantage. Knowing this, he did his 
 duty, and had his sovereign for his enemy when the 
 latter got used to being his own master. The fact 
 reveals an elevation of character in Buchanan which 
 cannot be justly forgotten in judging of him in other 
 connections. It is not surprising that the agents in 
 Scotland of Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's great minister, 
 when on the look-out for ' Biencontents,' as they 
 were called, who might be dealt with in the way of 
 bribery with a view to forming a strong Elizabethan 
 party in Scotland, should have secretly reported (1579, 
 King's age thirteen) Buchanan as 'a singular man/ while 
 of ' Mester Peter Young ' they say that he was ' specially 
 well affected, and ready to persuade the king to be 
 in favour of her majestye.' 
 
 Three years after dedicating the Baptistes to James 
 in the style we have seen, he dedicated the De Jure to 
 him (1579). This was a still bolder and more inde-
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 61 
 
 pendent proceeding. Without entering, for the present, 
 into the details of its argument, it may be enough to 
 remember that, with its doctrine of Sovereignty as 
 originating from the People, existing for their benefit, 
 and not autocratic, but bounded by laws to which the 
 People have consented, the De Jure must have appeared 
 to Absolutist and 'Divine right people' generally, revolu- 
 tionary rubbish of the most pernicious description; and 
 accordingly, in 1584, when Buchanan had been dead 
 two years, they had it condemned and its publication 
 and circulation forbidden by express Statute of the 
 Scots Parliament the King, of course, assenting, if not 
 inciting ; while, as we have already seen, the University 
 of Oxford, later on, paid it the compliment of having it 
 publicly burned. Buchanan must have, in a general 
 way, foreseen the possibility of something like this, and 
 the risk he ran if the King should, in his riper age, 
 turn upon him and seek to rend him. This, however, 
 did not deter him from pressing his democratic treatise 
 on the attention and study of his royal pupil. 
 
 He praises him, not in the fulsome and fawning 
 language of the Dedication literature of the time, but 
 with evident sincerity and honest, hearty admiration 
 for the brightness of his abilities, his intellectual 
 interests, his independence of judgment while in- 
 quiring into the truth of things and opinions. He
 
 62 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 congratulates him, too, on his present aversion tc 
 flattery, that ' nurse of Tyranny, and deadliest of 
 plagues to genuine kingship' tyrannidis nutricula^ et 
 legitimi regni gravissima pestis, and rejoices that he 
 seems ' instinctively to detest ' natura quodam instinctu 
 oderis ' the courtly solecisms and barbarisms ' solot- 
 cismos et barbarismos aulicos affected by those self- 
 chosen 'arbiters of elegance' elegantia censores who 
 ' spice their conversation ' velut sermonis condimenta 
 with 'profuse employment of "Your Majesty," "Your 
 Lordship," " Your Illustrious Highness," and any other 
 still more sickening title they can find' passim 
 MAJESTATES, DOMINATIONES, ILLUSTRITATES, et si qua 
 alia magis sunt putida, adspergant. Was there any 
 latent reference here to ' Mester Peter Young ' and his 
 courtier ways? Anyhow, Buchanan plainly owns that 
 he has doubts and fears for James's future. He tells 
 him of the dangers of evil companionship, and invites 
 him to the study of the essay thus dedicated to him, 
 not only as an instructor that will show him the right 
 and wrong of the subject, but as a Mentor that may 
 ' keep at him ' in importunate and even audacious 
 fashion, as it may seem for the moment. If he is 
 faithful to the principles commended to him, there will 
 be peace in the present for him and his, and lasting 
 glory in the future. James subsequently thought he
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 63 
 
 could do better, and threw off his early training ; but, 
 notwithstanding, or in consequence, he failed alike to 
 achieve a peaceful career or to transmit a glorious 
 memory. The citation from the chorus in the Thyestes 
 of Seneca who also was tutor to a royal failure, 
 although James must, of course, be admitted to have 
 been a brilliant success compared with Nero in which 
 the great but ill-starred Roman delineates the Stoic 
 king, appended to Buchanan's dedication, no doubt 
 expresses his own view of what James might and should 
 have been : beginning with 
 
 ' Regem non faciunt opes 
 Non vestis Tyriae color,' etc. 
 
 ' It is not wealth nor the purple robe that makes a king,' etc. 
 and ending 
 
 ' Rex est, qui metuit nihil, 
 Rex est, qui cupiet nihil. 
 Hoc regnum sibi quisque dat.' 
 
 ' He is a king who has conquered Fear and Desire. Such 
 a kingship every man may give himself, and none else.' 
 
 It is in the same spirit that he dedicates his History 
 to the King (1582, James sixteen). He knows per- 
 fectly well how his book is likely to be taken. Writing 
 (1577) to Sir Thomas Randolph, Queen Elizabeth's 
 representative at the Scottish court, and Buchanan's
 
 64 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 quondam pupil at Paris, he says : ' I am occupiit in 
 wryting of our historic, being assurit to content few, 
 and to displease many thairthrow.' Among the many 
 ' displeased,' he could not but foresee that possibly the 
 young King might be found, on account of the unfavour- 
 able view which, in common with most historians, he 
 felt himself obliged to take of the character and career 
 of the King's own mother, Queen Mary. He must 
 have felt too that, unless James were all the more 
 magnanimous, he might take deep offence as he did, 
 death alone saving Buchanan from criminal proceed- 
 ings on account of his ' seditious ' writings at his now 
 nominal preceptor's contention that by the Constitution 
 of Scotland the monarchy had, as an historical fact as 
 well as by a true philosophy, been all along a derivative 
 and limited, even very limited, one, and anything but 
 a divinely authorised Absolutism, as maintained by 
 courtly authorities. Buchanan, however, prefers to 
 assume that James had enough of the king and the 
 public man in him to sink private feeling in public duty 
 and accept truth, however unpleasant ; and accordingly 
 he dedicates his History to him, urging him to follow 
 the example of his good predecessors and eschew that 
 of the bad ones, and more particularly commending 
 to his notice and imitation the career of the saintly 
 David L, the c sair saunt for the crown' of one of his
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 65 
 
 successors and descendants, as a ruler who, according 
 to his lights some of which, however, especially those 
 that led to his profuse and corrupting liberality to the 
 Church, Buchanan, herein endorsing John Major, his 
 early St. Andrews 'regent' in Logic, emphatically 
 decries devoted himself not to pleasure, or the 
 strengthening of his prerogative, but to what seemed 
 to him to be the true welfare of his people. In all this, 
 some of Buchanan's critics have thought him too stern, 
 and that gentler methods might have won over James 
 to better thoughts. But truth must always be stern to 
 those who dislike or fear it. Yet those only are the 
 real friends of these latter who give them the chance 
 of profiting by it ; and in so acting by James, come 
 what might of himself and his personal fortunes, 
 Buchanan will be thought by most admirers of a high 
 morale to have stamped himself as a wholly high- 
 minded and even heroic character.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 A Stoic Philosopher 
 
 WE are now, perhaps, in a better position to face 
 Melville's further characterisation of him as a 'Stoik 
 philosopher, of gud religion for a poet.' That Sir 
 James knew something about Stoicism, although 
 perhaps not very deeply, is shown by his apparent 
 familiarity with the Seneca, whom he quotes in that 
 remarkable preface of his, although only for a sarcastic 
 comment upon those foolish political Stoics who, like 
 Sir James himself, throw away their Stoical honesty 
 upon unappreciative ' Princes,' and repent of their 
 Stoicism when too late. That Buchanan had studied 
 the Stoics goes without saying. He was as familiar 
 with the metres of Seneca and Boetius as with those of 
 Horace and Catullus, and he was not the man not the 
 pedant or grammarian to master the form and style 
 merely of his author without penetrating to his inner 
 thought. How minutely he had read Cicero appears 
 
 66
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 67 
 
 from his famous emendation in the second Philippic 
 oipatrem tuum, passed over by previous commentators, 
 into matrcm, subsequently parentem tuam a case in 
 which even Gibbon would probably have admitted that 
 a vowel, to say nothing of a diphthong, was vital to truth, 
 and which gave occasion to Dionysius Lambinus to 
 flay alive a rival Ciceronic editor, Petrus Victorius by 
 name, for critical larceny, in having feloniously but 
 silently appropriated, first, the laurels of Buchanan who 
 did the good deed, and next, those of him, Lambinus, 
 who had the sagacity to recognise and adopt Buchanan's 
 great performance. But Buchanan had doubtless read 
 Cicero's De Offiriis with not less care, and had gathered 
 from its pages some idea of Stoicism as expounded by 
 Cicero's own early tutor, Panaetius, probably the most 
 distinguished of Rome's then professional teachers of 
 this great ethical system. He must have come across 
 such a passage as this, where Cicero says : ' What is 
 called the summum bonum by the Stoics, to live agree- 
 ably to Nature (convcnienter Natures vivere), has, I con- 
 ceive, this meaning always to conform to virtue ; and 
 as to all other things which may be according to Nature 
 (secundum naturam) [i.e. other possible bona besides 
 the summum : as gratifications of appetite, propensity, 
 ambition, etc.], to take them if they should not be 
 repugnant to virtue,' a declaration which Butler, with
 
 68 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 his supremacy of conscience as part of true Nature, 
 would have accepted, and in substance, indeed, has 
 explicitly endorsed. Probably, too, he had noticed the 
 habitual doctrine of Epictetus, ' this is the great task of 
 life also, to discern things and divide them, and say, 
 " Outward things are not in my power ; to will is in 
 my power. Where shall I seek the Good, and where 
 the Evil ? Within me in all that is my own. But of 
 all that is alien to thee, call nothing good nor evil, nor 
 profitable nor hurtful, nor any such term as these. 
 What then ? should we be careless of such things ? In 
 no wise. For this, again, is a vice in the Will, and thus 
 contrary to Nature. But be at once careful, because 
 the use of things is not indifferent, and steadfast 
 and tranquil because the things themselves are. . . . 
 And hard it is, indeed, to mingle and reconcile 
 together the carefulness of one whom outward things 
 affect, with the steadfastness of him who regards them 
 not. But impossible it is not; and if it is, it is im- 
 possible to be happy. . . . Take example of dice- 
 players. The numbers are indifferent, the dice are 
 indifferent. How can I tell what may be thrown up ? 
 But carefully and skilfully to make use of what is 
 thrown, that is where my proper business begins"' 
 (Rolleston translation). 
 This seems to me to describe the general temper and
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 69 
 
 spirit in which Buchanan confronted the vicissitudes 
 of life. I do not say that in a Register of Religions 
 like that provided under 6 and 7 Will. iv. c. 85 
 and amending acts, he would have entered himself as 
 ' G. B., Stoic.' For one thing, he had not the chance, 
 as only one denomination was allowed. Nor do I 
 think he ever said in his heart, ' I am a Stoic, and 
 mean to guide my life by the Stoical system ' ; but all 
 the same, I believe that convenicnter natures vimre, 
 interpreted in the Stoical sense, sank with gradually 
 increasing depth into his moral nature as life went on, 
 and preserved him from Epicurean timidity, levity, and 
 egotism. Not that he succeeded perfectly, but he 
 kept trying to. Stoicism did not, any more than 
 Christianity, maintain that the concrete Stoic was free 
 from [sins,^both of omission and commission. Not 
 Socrates, nor" even Diogenes most misunderstood of 
 men, who attained the high degree of Cynic would 
 have been claimed as impeccable, although they came 
 very near it. It has been said that Buchanan in several 
 ways allowed the ' outward things that were not in his 
 power ' get the better of the ' will ' that was, that he 
 was, for instance, fiery and irritable, for little other 
 reason, apparently, than that he had Celtic blood in 
 him, and was bound to be so ; that he was dis- 
 appointed and soured by his early struggle with
 
 70 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 poverty, his critics assuming that this must have been 
 the case, because in his circumstances they would have 
 been so themselves ; that he was a ' good hater ' as if 
 that were really a fault at all, etc. 
 
 Had he been all that his detractors call him, that 
 would not have unstoicised him, since, as already 
 said, the system admits that ' no mere man is able to 
 keep the commandments, but doth daily break them,' 
 as the Shorter Catechism puts it in questionable 
 grammar. But his censors have not sufficiently 
 observed that if he displayed faults of passion, eager- 
 ness, temper, impatience, it was when he was young ; 
 and the fair inference is that if he overcame those 
 tendencies as life proceeded, it was by a persistent 
 effort of ' will,' repelling the invading influence of the 
 ' outward.' By all accounts his age was not a ' crabbed 
 age.' Though plain, and even rustic, in appearance 
 in the matter of dress he seems to have carried his 
 superiority to the ' outward ' to a really unstoical 
 extreme when he opened his mouth he was a dif- 
 ferent being, courtly in manner, refined and elegant 
 in expression, humorous and entertaining, as well as 
 instructive even to the verge of ' edifying,' in every way 
 a polite and variously pleasant companion 'with 
 nothing of the pedagogue about him but the gown,' 
 said a keen and competent observer, who knew him
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 71 
 
 well. 'Plaisant in company,' says the slightly garru- 
 lous Sir James, ' rehersing at all occasions moralities 
 short and fecfull, whereof he had aboundance, and 
 invented wher he wanted ' a combination, in short, of 
 wit, wisdom, resource, and pith, anything but a picture 
 of the snappish old curmudgeon, soured and made ill- 
 natured by disappointments which he had not wisely 
 overcome. His letters, too, of which unfortunately we 
 possess only a few, reveal the same well-ordered and 
 placid moral interior: full of the purest friendly 
 devotion, ready always to do a good turn, especially to 
 merit in obscurity, not insensible to the difficulties and 
 distresses of life, but rising above them, and achieving 
 in spite of them not only contentment, but a degree of 
 Hght-heartedness. He was long a martyr to gout a 
 sore affliction, if sufferers from it may be trusted. But 
 he took it with a smile. Writing (1577) at seventy-one 
 to his old friend and pupil Randolph, by that time 
 Postmaster-General to Queen Elizabeth, he tells him 
 that he is hard at work on his History, and adds : 
 ' The rest of my occupation is wyth the gout, quhilk 
 holdis me besy both day and nyt. And quhair ye say 
 ye haif not lang to lyif [live], I traist [trust] to God to 
 go before you, albeit I be on fut, and ye ryd the 
 post. . . . And thus I tak my leif [leave] shortly at 
 you now, and my lang leif quhen God pleasis.' The
 
 72 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 fun may not be of a side-splitting character, nor the 
 seriousness very unctuous, but the man who could en- 
 counter the gout keeping at him night and day in this 
 fashion, must have practised keeping the 'outward' 
 at bay in a considerable variety of situations, and for a 
 considerable time, and with considerable success. 
 
 Alleged Vindictiveness 
 
 The fastidious Sir James seems to think that 
 Buchanan rather stepped down from the high ' Stoik 
 philosopher ' pedestal in being what he calls ' extrem 
 vengeable against any man that had offendit him.' 
 But, as already suggested, Dr. Johnson, who was a 
 tolerable authority on the higher morality, would have 
 been rather prejudiced in Buchanan's favour on this 
 very account, and would probably have wished to 
 know Sir James's evidence for unfavourably meant 
 reflection, and would certainly have thought that it 
 did not amount to much. It may be pardoned in an 
 old ex -courtier to think it a dreadful thing to have 
 written 'dispytfull invectives against the Erie of 
 Monteith.' No doubt, the fact that the subject of the 
 incriminated 'invectives' was some 'particulaires that 
 was between him (the " Erie ") and the Laird of Buch- 
 whennen,' would dispose Buchanan to do his best, 
 because blood is thicker than water, and when
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 73 
 
 Buchanan was at his best on an invective, it is likely 
 enough that the object of it and his friends might 
 think it ' dispytfull,' if not worse, although unprejudiced 
 people might find it very good reading. But every- 
 thing depends on the merits of the ' particulaires,' and 
 of these Sir James tells us nothing. With every 
 respect to him and his kidney, an ' Erie ' may be in 
 the wrong while a ' Laird ' is in the right, and if that 
 were so in the present instance, it was the part of a 
 'philosopher,' and especially a 'Stoik' one, to take an 
 1 Erie ' precisely for what he was worth and no more, 
 as Diogenes, the champion Stoic, in the famous 
 anecdote, whether vero or ben trovato, tells Alexander 
 the Great that, as far as he knew, the only thing he 
 (the Great) could do for him (the champion) was to 
 stand out of his light. 
 
 Sir James's other instance of Buchanan's 'vengeable- 
 ness ' is not much more to the point. Perhaps the 
 story of the requisitioned ' hackney ' that was ' sa sur 
 of foot and sa easy ; is not true, and merely an instance 
 of the baseless gossip that so easily gets into circulation 
 about distinguished people, and people that are not 
 distinguished as well. But even if the 'said horse' 
 and Melville's history of it are facts, most people will 
 be of opinion that Buchanan had grounds of dis- 
 pleasure. He was deprived of the ' said horse ' there
 
 74 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 is no word of a price, but that is immaterial for 
 public purposes during the civil wars. When the 
 public purpose was satisfied, the animal ought to 
 have been returned to him. In the meantime Morton 
 had ' bocht ' the beast, apparently from the requisi- 
 tioner or his donee, and Morton was not the man to 
 pay too much for him. But when the morally rightful 
 proprietor applied to have his own back, and that time 
 after time, he found the Regent of Scotland standing 
 upon his real or fancied contractual rights. If 
 Buchanan and Morton were the great friends Melville 
 says they were, Buchanan was not treated in a friendly 
 manner. It takes two to make a friendship, and by 
 the proverb it is ' giff gaff,' not giff and no gaff, that 
 creates the connection. ' Love me, love my dog,' is 
 one thing ; but love me, and let me love your horse 
 a la Morton, is very much another thing. Loyalty is 
 tested by conduct in small matters, even more than in 
 great ones, and in the circumstances stated, it would 
 not have been wonderful if Buchanan's feeling of 
 personal liking for Morton, if it ever existed, under- 
 went a change. It is certain that Buchanan at a 
 particular point ceased to approve of parts of Morton's 
 policy, but not for any such trumpery reason as the 
 one assigned by tattling Sir James. While Knox was 
 alive, there was a complete solidarity of public action
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 75 
 
 between him and Morton and Buchanan, to whom 
 the cause of Protestantism meant the cause of liberty. 
 Their aim was to strengthen the position of Protestant- 
 ism in Scotland by the English Alliance, and to 
 strengthen the position of Elizabeth as fighting the 
 general battle of Protestantism against the Catholic re- 
 action of the Continent ; while, even in spite of Eliza- 
 beth herself, who had an interest in Monarchical 
 Absolutism as well as in Protestant freedom, they 
 firmly resisted every attempt to restore Mary, the 
 champion of the old faith and its political tyranny. 
 
 With this view Knox, who was a statesman, and not 
 the mere crazy fanatic and demagogue that he is 
 sometimes mistaken for, winked at the moral irregu- 
 larities of Morton, and would even have joined the 
 General Assembly in making him an 'Elder,' if he had 
 not himself, though quite free from scruples, felt that 
 this would have been putting on rather too much ; 
 while Buchanan gave him every support in his power, 
 and as internal evidence shows, wrote for him the 
 Memorial demanded by Elizabeth at the final London 
 Conference, in which the right of the Scottish nation 
 to depose Mary from her regal office is defended on 
 the same principles and often in the same language 
 as are employed in the Detectio, the De Jure, the 
 History, and indeed all through Buchanan's writings.
 
 76 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 After Knox's death he still pursued the anti-Marian 
 and pro- Elizabethan policy, but with a difference. To 
 complete the unity of Scottish and English Protestant- 
 ism, Morton sought to reduce the Scottish Church to 
 the same level with the English that is, to make it 
 Episcopal and Erastian. When he made this proposal 
 he was fully aware of the opposition on which he had 
 to reckon ; for although he made very light of the other 
 Presbyterian clergy, and indeed told some of them who 
 kept boring him beyond endurance that he might have 
 some of them ' hanged ' if they did not take care, he knew 
 that in Knox he met a man who was not afraid of him, 
 or any one, or anything else, and who was the one man 
 in Scotland who was a stronger man than himself. 
 
 But when Knox was gone, he had the stage to him- 
 self, and began to develop his views, apparently 
 seeking to use Buchanan as a tool for carrying them 
 into execution. James Melville, in his entertaining 
 diary, tells us that when Andrew his uncle returned 
 from abroad, Morton sent Buchanan to him to try 
 whether the influence of an old master over an old 
 pupil and lifelong friend could not prevail on Andrew 
 to assist him in more or less Anglicising the ' Kirk.' 
 The idea of getting Andrew Melville to assent to 
 Episcopacy and Erastianism, or any modification of 
 them, was of course utterly futile and ludicrous. You
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 77 
 
 might as well have tried to marry fire and water. To 
 Buchanan himself the proposal would not appear 
 unreasonable in itself. He was not an ecclesiastic, but 
 a scholar and thinker to whom the struggle between 
 Presbyterian and Prelate would appear a sectarian 
 squabble, but his interview with his severely Puritanical 
 pupil undoubtedly convinced him that Morton's - 
 scheme for turning the Scottish into a branch of the 
 Anglican church would simply defeat itself. It would 
 rend and desolate the ecclesiastical life of Scotland as 
 was too amply proved by the Scottish history of the 
 seventeenth century, and paralyse it for the time as 
 a power in resisting the efforts of the avowed or tacit 
 
 Catholic League to crush that element of liberty in 
 
 > 
 the Protestant revolt, which to Buchanan was its most 
 
 valuable characteristic. This, and not ' the said horse,' 
 was unquestionably the explanation of Buchanan's 
 growing antagonism to Morton. If 'the said horse' 
 was not a myth, it might, taken in conjunction with the 
 abortive Melville negotiation, lead Buchanan to think 
 that Morton was just a little too much disposed to con- 
 vert his friends into useful instruments for his own * 
 purposes an impression which would be greatly 
 deepened when he noticed Morton's great and increas- 
 ing anxiety to get the young King, Buchanan's special 
 charge, into his power, Buchanan's opposition to which
 
 78 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 project, for which Melville (Sir James) expressly 
 vouches, contributed ultimately to Morton's downfall. 
 
 But that Buchanan, from the alleged 'hackney' 
 period, and from ' hackney ' causes, ' spak evil ' of 
 Morton 'in all places and at all occasions,' is not 
 only incredible when we remember the high character 
 and intellectual tastes of the man, but inconsistent 
 with the facts of the situation. If Buchanan had 
 desired to abuse Morton in a vindictive spirit, he had 
 / the amplest opportunity in his History. But what 
 are the facts? There is not a word of depreciation, 
 but many of praise, more or less direct. He does 
 full justice to Morton's great powers and wise foresight, 
 and in accordance with a rule which he held ought 
 to be applied to public men, screens his defects. He 
 describes him exactly as he was, a fearless and skilful 
 military leader, and a sagacious, firm, and patriotic 
 statesman. He even goes out of his way a little to 
 state facts in Morton's favour, recording the energy 
 and self-sacrifice which he once and again displayed 
 in rising from a sick-bed of very serious prostration 
 and redeeming a dangerous crisis to which he knew 
 no one else was equal, and in relating the last negotia- 
 tions which Morton conducted with Elizabeth and her 
 council pays a due compliment to his diplomatic dex- 
 terity and merit. Detractors have said that he stopped
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 79 
 
 in his History when on the threshold of Morton's 
 Regency, because he did not wish to advertise an 
 adversary. But it was really death, not animosity, that 
 stayed the narrator's hand. By a weird prescience, 
 Buchanan forecast the hour of his exit from time to 
 a nicety, if such a term may be employed in such a 
 connection. He worked up to within a month of his 
 death ; and then, when asked whether he meant to go 
 on with his work, he said he had now another work 
 to do ; and when further asked what that was, he said 
 it was the work of ' dying,' to which he addressed 
 himself in the fashion we have already seen a fashion 
 not unworthy of a ' Stoik philosopher.' 
 
 Not so Facile 
 
 It is of course a pity that we do not possess an 
 account and criticism of Morton's singularly able and 
 interesting rule in Scotland by so original a con- 
 temporary observer as Buchanan. That it would, in 
 all respects, have been favourable, is not likely, for 
 the reasons already noticed. That it would have been 
 consciously unjust is incredible in the light of such 
 treatment of Morton by Buchanan as we have, much 
 of which must have been written after Morton's violent 
 and unjust execution. Indeed, one could almost wish
 
 8o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 to be sure that the 'hackney' story was true, as it 
 would show how superior the ' Stoik philosopher ' can 
 rise to petty and personal considerations when he has 
 to discharge the high function of narrator and judge 
 of public events. That his delineation of men and 
 events would have been conspicuously able is as 
 certain as any such matter can be, notwithstanding 
 good Sir James's remark that 'in his auld dayes he 
 was become sleperie and cairless, and followed in 
 many things the vulgair oppinion, for he was naturally 
 populaire,' etc. There is no sign of this alleged fall- 
 ing off into sleepiness and carelessness in Buchanan's 
 History. The last chapter is as well thought out and 
 written as the first. You may think him wrong, but 
 you can have no doubt about the distinctness of his 
 explanation of the sequence of events and the motives 
 and aims of historic characters, while the style in no 
 respect falls below the unsurpassed standard of prose 
 Latinity maintained throughout the entire work. One 
 grows a little suspicious of Sir James's judgment when 
 his reasons for it are considered. Buchanan had 
 come, he says, to 'follow in many things the vulgair 
 oppinion, for he was naturally populaire ' ; that is to 
 say, he was democratic in spirit. Of course he was. 
 He felt it to be his mission in life to oppose Regal 
 Absolutism in behalf of public liberty, and never let
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 81 
 
 slip an opportunity of maintaining that all sovereignty 
 originated from the people, and was justifiable only 
 as it subserved their advantage. The courtly Sir 
 James did not like this. He was a good deal of what 
 Thackeray has immortalised as a 'Snob.' He might 
 very well be called Sir 'Jeames,' and when he says 
 Buchanan had been 'maid factious/ we must not 
 forget that the ' faction ' Sir J. had in his eye was the 
 'faction' of Liberty against Tyranny, and how far 
 that can be justly called a faction will be settled by 
 different critics according to their different tastes. 
 
 With his soreness on this point, it is not surprising 
 that he should describe Buchanan as 'easily abused, 
 and sa facill that he was led with any company that 
 he hanted for the tyme,' and that ' he spak and wret 
 as they that were about him for the tym informed him.' 
 That is to say, Buchanan did not belong to Sir J.'s 'set,' 
 which is not surprising. The Democratic old scholar 
 and thinker was not likely to sympathise with the 
 kind of people whom the courtier naturally regarded 
 as the 'elite of society and the salt of the earth. Knox 
 and Scaliger, Moray and Mar, Randolph and Ascham, 
 Melville and Scrymgeour, Beza and Tycho Brahe, were 
 among his correspondents or intimates ; and if Buchanan 
 thought that 'information' derived from persons of 
 that stamp was prima facie trustworthy, it was no more 
 
 F
 
 82 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 than the rules of evidence permitted and justified. 
 It is barely conceivable that they sought to 'abuse' 
 him and succeeded, but specific proof of this is 
 necessary in such a case, and is not forthcoming. 
 That Buchanan was c sa facill that he was led with 
 any company that he hanted for the tyme ' is rendered 
 utterly incredible by the facts. It is one of the most 
 remarkable circumstances in Buchanan's career that 
 he mixed with people of the most opposite and irrecon- 
 cilable characters and positions, while preserving his 
 independence of both. There was, for instance, a 
 time when he was equally at home with Maitland and 
 Moray, and what is more wonderful still, with Knox 
 and Mary. On the very same day when he had been 
 reading Livy and turning verses with Mary at Holy- 
 rood, he might be discussing Calvin and the political 
 situation with Knox in his High Street house; and 
 what is more, each of them knew it. To my mind 
 this does not point to 'facility,' but to dominancy. 
 The 'Stoik philosopher' was quietly their master, 
 because he was his own. He was not moved by their 
 inter-personal attractions and repulsions, but passion- 
 lessly contemplated them as interesting life-' forces,' 
 that he had to take as they came along, and in 
 his calm judicial presence they bowed their more 
 vehement heads. That is as probable an ex-
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 83 
 
 planation as any of a very striking psychological 
 phenomenon. 
 
 1 Gud Religion ' 
 
 'He was also of gud religion for a poet,' says Sir 
 James, when adding the last item to the creditor 
 side of his profit and loss account of Buchanan's 
 qualities. 'Gud religion for a poet' is good, and 
 characteristic of the times which said Ubi tres media, 
 duo athei, 'Three Physicists, 1 two Atheists.' Human- 
 ists, and still more Humanist poets, were also suspect, 
 and for the same reason. The rebellion against 
 Scholasticism, the resuscitation of the old Pagan 
 spirit in thought and art and science, involved a 
 staggering blow to Ecclesiastical Faith. Men whose 
 minds were steeped in the literature of ancient Greece 
 and Rome could not take sympathetically, I will not 
 say, to Christianity, but to the dogmatic system of the 
 Church, and even to much of its ethical teaching. 
 'Humanity,' in the sense of 'the humanities,' really 
 meant the antithesis of Divinity. The Renaissance 
 was a wakening up of the human intellect, an assertion 
 of 'private judgment' in every possible sphere of its 
 exercise, and in innumerable instances the Humanist 
 
 1 This covers the meaning more accurately than ' Physicians.'
 
 84 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 created a faith and a code of morals for himself, 
 although for comfort and convenience he might con- 
 ceal his spiritual interior from the view of the ignorant 
 and the unenlightened. In many an instance he held 
 that there was one law for the men who understand, 
 and another for the ' vulgar ' who cannot understand. 
 Popes and priests were often at heart Humanists of 
 the most 'advanced' type, pushing the right of 
 ' private judgment ' to its furthest limit, discarding the 
 public creed, and in morals, exercising, in favour of 
 their appetites, that dispensing power which 'private 
 judgment,' the Pope's successor in so many awakened 
 intellects, carried over with it, at all events extensively 
 into practice, while simultaneously a silent outward 
 conformity with the established system was carefully 
 maintained. 
 
 Not that it did not sometimes betray itself. It is 
 a Roman dignitary who is credited with the famous 
 remark about the profit brought in by 'this fable 
 of Christ'; and everybody remembers how horrified 
 poor Luther was in Rome when he heard the priests 
 at Mass saying panis ts, pants manebis, ' bread thou 
 art, and bread thou shall remain.' The open licentious- 
 ness of many Church dignitaries of those days is too 
 notorious for special mention. ' Private judgment ' 
 may be a primary human right and a duty owing by
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 85 
 
 reason to itself of the highest order ; but to cast off 
 in its favour an inveterate obedience to authority, is 
 a psychological problem surrounded with the greatest 
 difficulty and danger, and unless when under the 
 control of an adequately strong judgment and will, 
 may cause much wreckage of faith and conduct. I 
 do not think that Buchanan suffered much in this 
 way certainly not so much as many others among 
 the leaders and supporters of the Reformation ; while 
 any damage he sustained was amply compensated by 
 his gains. Knox and other Reformers I speak of 
 Scotland were driven by the violence of the recoil 
 involved in their assault on the Catholic and Feudal 
 system into extreme positions, necessarily harmful to 
 themselves, and bequeathing legacies of disadvantage 
 to their successors. 
 
 They needed, through polemical necessities, an 
 authority equal to that of Rome, which they had 
 overthrown, and this drove them into placing Scripture 
 in a position which the speculative and historical 
 criticism of the last two centuries has made highly 
 uncomfortable for many people of intelligence, includ- 
 ing Broad Churchmen, whom it has driven into crypto- 
 scepticism, and Evangelicals and Ritualists, whom it 
 has moulded into wilful believers. Their denuncia- 
 tion and destruction of ' idolatry ' and every rite ' not
 
 86 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 appointed in the Word,' with the necessity they lay 
 under of maintaining a high standard of Biblical 
 morality as a proof that Antinomian licence was not 
 the necessary result of Justification by Faith, engaged 
 them in a war against Art, Literature, and Natural 
 Beauty and Pleasure, which, while it stamped the 
 national consciousness with a grave, deep, and serious 
 habit of regarding life, which is of the greatest value, 
 produced also an immense amount, not yet exorcised, 
 of official Pharisaism, popular hypocrisy, and practical 
 pessimism, with all its miserable consequences. These 
 were unfortunate results of the great rebellion against 
 authority and claim of 'private judgment,' apparently 
 suggested, in part at least, by self-defence; while the 
 Nicene and Predestinarian dogmas were put forward 
 with an emphasis and detail which would not be 
 attempted in the present day, but were very seasonable 
 in times when immaculate and even strained orthodoxy 
 was both weapon and armour in a degree that does 
 not prevail now. 
 
 Knox, it must be remembered, did not discourage 
 the belief that he could predict the future and had 
 a good deal of the ' second-sight ' in him. He had a 
 powerful political instinct, and he and his chief 
 associates knew that if they went 'too far' in their 
 destructions, the alarm would be taken, and the life
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 87 
 
 and death struggle in which they were engaged would 
 for them be lost for ever ; and every man of any depth 
 of thought or feeling is aware that the 'doctrines of 
 grace,' in their inner, perhaps mystical, interpretation, 
 and apart altogether from the stupendous metaphysical 
 and historical setting assigned them in systems of 
 Christian dogma, have a consoling, strengthening, and 
 guiding influence on that vast body of serious, simple, 
 if often practically powerful natures, to whom Criticism 
 is neither a necessity nor a possibility. Such a 
 union of accommodation and exaggeration need not 
 be construed as of set purpose propositional in form, 
 and deliberate in execution. In the transition from 
 authority to private judgment initiated by Humanism 
 and the Renaissance generally, special Reformation 
 exigencies may be conceived as leading to such a 
 union, so that in thought and action it was only semi- 
 conscious and instinctive, and there was little time 
 for the minutiae of introspective scrutiny. On the 
 ethical side, however, there was no Renaissance loosen- 
 ing among the mass of the leading Reformers. The 
 value of the controversial mendacities propagated 
 about the morals of Knox may be judged of by the 
 fact that the coryphaeus of the revilers maintained that 
 he won his second wife by magic ! As a rule they 
 kept the ten commandments, and especially the
 
 88 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 seventh, rigidly. They failed a good deal on the 
 new one of Charity. They preached the 'Gospel' 
 with technical accuracy, but they mostly practised the 
 ' Law,' and if Paul had returned among them, he would 
 probably have re-edited his Epistle to the Romans, 
 with up-to-date applications, as indeed he might have 
 to do still.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM 
 
 IN Buchanan's case, the revolt from authority seems 
 to have produced different effects. As regards dogma, 
 it appears to have led him into an attitude of mind 
 that was mainly negative. He had none of the 
 ' Evangelical ' fervour which marked the utterances of 
 Knox, Luther, Calvin though to a less degree, and 
 the Reforming preachers of Scotland. He never 
 preached, in the popular sense of the word, although 
 as Principal of St. Leonard's and 'doctor in the 
 schools' he could easily have had himself 'called' 
 and ordained, if he had been animated by any 
 zeal for the function. He could not have written 
 such letters as Knox wrote, full of pious sentiment 
 and sympathy, in phraseology that was absolutely 
 unctuous, to Mrs. Bowes, and Mrs. Locke, and other 
 women, who leant on him for a sort of semi-priestly 
 or confessorial guidance. He was a critic, not a senti- 
 mentalist. You may read his whole works through, 
 prose and poetry both, without knowing that he laid 
 
 89
 
 90 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 any stress on the Calvinism of the Scottish Church, 
 except on its destructive side. Indeed, much of his 
 literary work was done before he openly and formally 
 broke with Rome, which he was in no hurry to do. 
 He satirises the clergy, especially the monks, and 
 ridicules such doctrines as those of Indulgences and 
 Transubstantiation, the latter especially in the Francis- 
 canus, where it is stated with a grossness and extra- 
 vagance of literalism which would probably be 
 disowned by the highest order of Catholic dogmatist. 
 As the Franciscanus was published, after revision and 
 completion, in his Protestant days, this may have been 
 an addition of the period; but nowhere, in anything 
 he wrote during the Protestant part of his career, does 
 he emphasise, or almost even allude to, such doctrines 
 as Justification by Faith, the Incarnation, the Atone- 
 ment, Election, and Reprobation, or any of the positive 
 dogmatic propositions most prominently characteristic 
 of Scottish Protestantism. 
 
 Not a Zealot 
 
 It is remarkable that in his History he associates the 
 Reformers less with Evangelium than vt'\\hLibertas, They 
 are the vindices libertatis ' the champions of liberty ' 
 quite as much or oftener than the Evangelii professores 
 'the professors of the Evangel,' from which it might
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 91 
 
 seem that for Buchanan, not the least valuable aspect 
 of Protestantism lay in its being a struggle for liberty 
 a view in which a good many other people will be 
 ready to concur. Queen Mary, in her later years, 
 protesting against Buchanan's appointment as her son's 
 tutor, described him, in writing, as an 'Atheist'; but 
 that was in the sense in which Athanasius described 
 Arius as an atheist, and is said to have seized an oppor- 
 tunity of striking him in the jaw in that capacity, to 
 show what he thought of it and him. Arius, however, 
 constantly professed himself a believer in 'God, the 
 Father Almighty,' under, of course, 'heretical' modifi- 
 cations ; but Athanasius thought that a wrong God 
 that is, a God that was not God, according to Athan- 
 asius was no God, and spoke and acted accordingly. 
 Buchanan was certainly no atheist in his own sense 
 and intention, which, it must always be remembered, 
 was essentially of a deep-sea seriousness, although the 
 wavelets of wit might often dance and gleam on its 
 surface. He manifestly held by some Almighty Power 
 called by him God, >eus, JVumen, Providentia ; but 
 whether this was the God of Mary Stuart, or the 
 anthropomorphic God of Calvin, or the accommoda- 
 tion to the popular sense of reverence ascribed by 
 many people, and not without reason, to Carlyle, might 
 form a subject of discussion.
 
 92 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Bearing on this matter, passing allusion may be made 
 to the Dirge or Epicedium, as he called it, which 
 Buchanan wrote on the death of Calvin (1564), an 
 event which occurred some three years, more or less, 
 after Buchanan had publicly become a Protestant, when 
 he was already a member of the General Assembly, 
 sitting cheek-by-jowl with Knox, and on the Assembly's 
 judicial committee ; the year when Mary, having been 
 finally off with the Spanish Don Carlos marriage, was 
 drawing towards the Catholic Darnley marriage, 
 which Knox, correctly scenting on the way, was 
 beginning to anathematise by anticipation, he having 
 the year before fiercely denounced from the High Kirk 
 pulpit the Spanish alliance as fatal to Scotland, because 
 it was an 'infidel' marriage, and 'all Papists are 
 infidels,' said the uncompromising one, in the true 
 Athanasian vein, on the head of which he had quar- 
 relled with Mary and Moray also ; while all the time 
 Buchanan was, to Knox's knowledge, continuing to act 
 as Mary's Court poet, and possibly meditating on the 
 ' Pompa ' or masque for her wedding, and getting on 
 so well with her that she was arranging for giving him 
 that ^500 (Scots) pension from Crossraguel Abbey, 
 out of which it cost him such excruciating difficulty to 
 get anything at all, at the same time that he was 
 helping the General Assembly to revise the Book oj
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 93 
 
 Discipline, translating Spanish despatches for the Privy 
 Council, and generally acting as ' handy man ' on the } 
 highest planes all round. This ' Dirge ' is too long for 
 quotation : a curious attempt to combine the Pagan 
 spirit and the Calvinistic theology spiritual elevation 
 and sarcastic wit in the best poetic form. ' Those who 
 believe that there are no Manes, i.e. no hereafter, or if 
 they do, live despising Pluto and the trans-Stygian 
 penalties, may well deplore their coming fate, while 
 they leave sorrow to surviving friends. But we have 
 no such grief over our lost Calvin. He has passed 
 beyond the stars, and, filled with a draught of Deity 
 (Numinis), lives in an eternal and nearer enjoyment 
 of "God" (Deo). But Death has not taken all of 
 him from us. We have monuments of his genius and 
 his fame wherever the Reformed religion has spread. 
 We have the terror which he struck, and which his 
 name will continue to strike, into your Popes your 
 Clements and Pauls, and Juliuses and Piuses; while 
 we know that the Pontiff tyrant of fire and sword who 
 appropriated all the functions of the nether kingdom 
 becoming a Pluto in empire, a Harpy in his shameful 
 extortions, a Fury in his martyr-making fire, a Charon 
 in his viaticum (Charon naulo), and a Cerberus in his 
 mitre (triplici corona Cerberus) will have to appropriate 
 the penalties also of the same lower world, becoming a
 
 94 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Tantalus thirsty amidst waters, a Sisyphus rolling 
 back the ever- recurring stone, a Prometheus with 
 vultures ceaselessly pecking at his liver, a Danaid 
 vainly filling her empty bucket, and an Ixion twisted 
 into a circle on his endless wheel.' 
 
 A prof os of Calvin's ' draught of Deity,' Buchanan 
 gives in the course of the poem what seems to be 
 meant for an explanation of the spiritual work of 
 'regeneration,' which, I am afraid, would not have 
 been so satisfactory to Mess John Davidson as some 
 others of his efforts to propitiate that sound divine. 
 As the soul animates the body, otherwise a mass of 
 clay sic animi Deus est animus so ' " God " is the 
 Soul of the soul,' and when the Numinis haustus, the 
 ' draught of Deity,' has been taken, the soul which 
 before was 'shrouded in darkness, illusioned by empty 
 appearance, and grasping at mere shadows of the " right 
 and good,"' sees the 'darkness disappear, the vain 
 " simulacra " cease, the unveiled face of " truth " reveal 
 itself in light.' I may be wrong, but this looks to me 
 more like a Pantheistic theory of ' illumination ' than 
 the 'regeneration' of the Calvinistic creeds ! Besides, 
 there is no word of ' sin,' and the change to at least 
 an incipient ' holiness ' only from ' illusion ' to ' truth ' 
 (verum). If it be said that this must be assumed, then 
 a new contradiction of Calvinism arises, since a divine
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 95 
 
 Soul of the soul cannot will evil, and ' sanctification ' 
 is thus erroneously made out to be an instantaneous 
 act and not a gradual process. Altogether, and as it 
 stands, the passage might have been written by one of 
 those later Stoics, including possibly Aurelius himself, 
 who seem to have believed in the indwelling Divinity, 
 and that the souls of good men at death were not im- 
 mediately reabsorbed into the All, but lived with ' God,' 
 in some cases a thousand years, in others for ever, or, at 
 all events, until the ' philosopher's year ' was over, and 
 the new cycle began to repeat the history of the old. 
 
 But there is one omission which, among various 
 others, seems remarkable. Of the relics enumerated 
 by Buchanan as left by Calvin, he passes over the 
 most important of all Calvin's own body. He makes 
 no reference to the resurrection. Yet, on orthodox 
 principles, Calvin's glory and beatitude could not be 
 complete until that event. If Calvin had been writing 
 about Buchanan, instead of vice versa, he would not have 
 forgotten the matter, for he laid great stress upon it. 
 ' He alone,' he says, ' has made solid progress in the 
 Gospel, who has acquired the habit of meditating con- 
 tinually on a blessed resurrection.' Buchanan's silence 
 here and on other points that have been mentioned, 
 and the scantiness, brevity, for the most part 
 simply Theistic references he makes to matters of
 
 96 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 faith, are significant. He clearly was not zealous 
 about most of those doctrines on which the Reforming 
 preachers placed the greatest emphasis. His training 
 and wide intellectual illumination must have stood in 
 the way of his sympathising with the more violent 
 among them, probably not excepting Knox himself 
 occasionally. In this connection one thinks of an- 
 other illustrious son of the Renaissance, Erasmus, 
 Buchanan's senior by forty years. After all he had 
 said and done, the Protestants demanded, with loud 
 reproaches, that he should publicly join their ranks. 
 Erasmus would not, perhaps could not. The alternate 
 violence and unctuousness of the Evangelicals repelled 
 him as much as the ignorance, and worse, of the monks 
 disgusted him. With certain reforms in morals, con- 
 stitution, and discipline, he did not see why the old 
 Church should not be satisfactorily worked on the 
 lines of the traditional doctrine and ritual. Probably 
 he thought that if a man could reconcile himself to the 
 Nicene dogmas and their consequences, it was not 
 worth his pains boggling over Transubstantiation. Al- 
 though any one may see that his heart was in many 
 things with the Reform movement, he had never directly 
 and openly denied any dogma. Apparently he was 
 not prepared in his own mind to do so. 
 
 If a man is asked, ' Do you deny that Abracadabra
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 97 
 
 is Mesopotamia?' he can probably say 'No' quite 
 conscientiously ; and there can be no doubt that this 
 attitude of non-denial is widely accepted for positive 
 faith. The Roman Church, and the Roman Empire 
 before it, were quite willing to take it so. If a man 
 would hold his peace, they would let him alone. Eras- 
 mus condemned the outbreak of Luther, whose faith in 
 the immense amount of doctrine he left untouched he 
 perhaps regarded as simply a huge faculty of taking 
 things for granted, ending in straining at the gnat and 
 swallowing the camel. For myself, as one of the 
 crowd, I am glad that with all his blunders and short- 
 comings, so easy to point out at this distance, Luther 
 took his own way, and did what he did. Truth is 
 greater than peace. 'Ye shall know the truth, and 
 the truth shall make you free,' is the method of 
 Christianity, unless the Founder of it is mistaken. 
 The martyrs had faults and weaknesses say even that 
 they were mistaken, but they were men of nobler 
 spirit, and did more for us and our liberties than 
 the traditortS) the 'traitors' who handed over their 
 Scriptures to the Praetor rather than face the lions. Up 
 to a certain point, Buchanan's attitude seems to have 
 been practically that of Erasmus. He tells us him- 
 self in his Autobiography, that while a student at the 
 University of Paris (1526-29, pp. 20-23) ne 'fell i 
 
 G
 
 98 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the spreading flame of the Lutheran sect.' Several years 
 later (1535-38), while resident in Scotland, he wrote 
 some satirical verses on the Franciscan monks, which 
 the brethren took in high dudgeon, very much to 
 Buchanan's astonishment boys always are astonished 
 that frogs should object to the pleasant amusement 
 of being stoned, and gave him so much annoyance, 
 ending in his having to flee the country for his life, as 
 to make him, in his own words, ' more keenly hostile 
 to the licentiousness of the clergy, and less indisposed 
 to the Lutheran cause than before.' 
 
 Silent Doubt. 
 
 All this time, however, he appears not to have 
 attacked or denied anything in creed or ritual, 
 although there cannot be a doubt that he had his 
 own secret doubts. The relentless persecution of 
 the monkish enemies he had made for himself at last 
 brought him before the Inquisition (1548) at Coimbra, 
 in Portugal, where he was acting as 'Regent' in a 
 college recently founded by the King; but although 
 the Inquisitors had him through their hands several 
 times, they discovered nothing against him that could 
 properly be called heretical. He was said to have 
 eaten flesh in Lent, but everybody did it there, when
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 99 
 
 they could get it. He was said to have given it as his 
 opinion that on the Eucharistic controversy Augus- 
 tine's opinions were more favourable to the Lutherans 
 than to the Church; but that was merely literary or 
 historical criticism, not heresy. Two young gentle- 
 men testified that Buchanan was not at heart a good 
 Catholic which was probably true enough, but was 
 not specific. So they shut him up, as already said, in a 
 monastery to be taught by monks, who, though good 
 fellows, did not know anything ; and for want of some- 
 thing better to do, Buchanan made his famous Latin 
 paraphrase of the Psalms. What must his Faith have 
 been during those years? Manifestly, like that of 
 Erasmus, less a positive assent than an abstinence from 
 denial. Would he deny Transubstantiation or the 
 Trinity? No, he was not ready to do anything of 
 the kind anyhow, not yet. 
 
 It need not be maintained that in all this Buchanan, 
 or Erasmus either, was merely seeking to save his own 
 skin. He may have thought that it was best for the 
 order and edification of society to let things alone. 
 Probably too, by this time, that spirit of Stoicism, 
 which I have shown reason for believing sank 
 deeper into Buchanan's nature as time went on, 
 was beginning to assert itself. And here, in passing 
 may I say that the common popular image of the
 
 ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Stoic as a gloomy, unbending, sour, cantankerous, 
 repulsive curmudgeon, is a mistake. There is nothing 
 in Stoicism to make him so, and as a matter of 
 fact he was not so. Aurelius was a finished gentle- 
 man. Seneca had all the culture of his time, and was 
 the poet of the day. Boetius was a polished courtier. 
 
 When Buchanan went over to the Reformers, it was 
 / 
 the smartest epigrammatist going who was joining the 
 
 most advanced party and leaving the 'stupid' party 
 behind. To return. It was a well-known rule of the 
 Stoics not to quarrel with the popular beliefs, but, if 
 possible, to utilise them for good, as we see Buchanan 
 does with the Pagan mythology in his Dirge on 
 Calvin's death. Socrates, their model wise man, 
 teaches conformity to the cult of the city where the 
 sage resides ; and everybody will recollect the care 
 with which, as his trial approached, he arranged that 
 Esculapius should have the cock that was due him. 
 Probably Esculapius is still receiving a good deal of 
 that class of poultry. For a long time indeed until 
 he was fifty-five, the last five of which he spent in 
 carefully scrutinising and balancing theological contro- 
 versies, and examining the whole situation Buchanan 
 followed the lines of Erasmus, used the cult of the 
 Roman Esculapius to go on with, pending eventuali- 
 ties. But when the termination of the Guisian
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 101 
 
 tyranny in Scotland made it safe for him to return, 
 he had to make up his mind whether he was to side 
 with the cause of oppression as advocated by the 
 Church in which he had been born and lived up to 
 now, or that in which, though unfortunately with 
 certain drawbacks, a battle was being fought for 
 liberty to express opinions different from those taught 
 by the Church. Nobody who knew Buchanan could 
 doubt what his choice would be. 
 
 The transition would be all the easier that in his 
 new quarters he would find much less to offend his 
 philosophic reason than in his old ones; but would 
 there not be an occasional bird to be sacrificed still ? 
 He had been doing it all his Catholic life. Was it 
 completely over now? That is not likely. But, 
 however that may be, Buchanan was the least dog- 
 matic and the most tolerant of all the theologically 
 instructed men who helped to give Protestantism its 
 place in Scotland. He might have preached had he 
 chosen, but as he shrank from priest's orders in the 
 Catholic Church, so he shrank in the Protestant from 
 a position in which he would be bound to dogmatise. 
 He did not frown upon Mary's private Mass, while 
 Knox denounced it as worse than ten thousand armed 
 opponents. When he narrates the hanging of a priest, 
 according to statute, for saying Mass a third time, he
 
 102 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 does not exult, as was no doubt done by the men of 
 the 'Congregation,' and possibly by Knox himself, 
 when they heard of the happy event. There is nothing 
 about him of the zeal of the renegade, who often 
 out-Herods Herod in championing his new faith a 
 tendency from which Knox was by no means free. 
 In his History he evidently tries to hold the balance 
 fair between Catholic and Protestant, and is as just 
 to Mary of Guise as to Moray. His whole religious 
 career points to a man who thought profoundly and 
 inquired anxiously after truth, and was careful to give 
 expression to his feeling of reverence for the mystery 
 of being by outward conformity with a creed and ritual 
 to which he could more or less reconcile his reason. 
 Well might James Melville (Rev., not Sir) describe 
 him not only as a ' maist learned and wyse,' but also as 
 a ' maist godlie ' man, although he himself might have 
 preferred ' spiritual ' as a more comprehensive epithet. 
 It may be objected that men like Buchanan and 
 Erasmus did not act honestly in remaining silent and 
 conforming members of a system which they secretly 
 regarded as in many vital respects false, and an 
 imposture upon the world. Of course, it is to be said 
 for Buchanan that he did ultimately come out of it ; 
 but then, why not sooner? Why did he not earlier 
 follow the lead of Luther and Calvin and Knox?
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 103 
 
 For one thing, it must be remembered that even these 
 great heroes of veracity had probably their reticences. 
 At all events, they have left to us the legacy of an 
 incompletely performed work. Was their outspoken- 
 ness equal to Christ's? His brought Him to the 
 cross. It seems to be in the nature of the Ideal that 
 to make an utterly clean breast of it should be perilous 
 or fatal to its revealer, and the hero of Truth who 
 dies in his bed has probably made a good many 
 compromises with his conscience to achieve that 
 result. It is all a matter of degree, a comparison of 
 the well and the very well, of the bad and the too bad. 
 A good man is a man who tries to be good, and a bad 
 man is a man who does not care whether he is bad 
 or good. But man is finite, and there can be nothing 
 absolute in human life, except perhaps the absolute 
 fool who thinks there may. Everything depends on 
 the state of the facts. In these days, for instance, 
 when historical and speculative criticism has put 
 Scripture and the supernatural in so very different a 
 position from that assigned to them by the Reformers, 
 there is too good reason to believe, especially in the 
 light of intra-ecclesiastical demands for the revision of 
 Confessions and Articles, that many of the clergy feel 
 extremely uneasy in being pledged to dogmas which 
 they more or less disbelieve. As they could not speak
 
 104 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 out without having to face starvation for those 
 dependent on them, a merciful man might be disposed 
 to say that while the situation was bad, it was perhaps 
 not unpardonable, and that the person implicated 
 might still be regarded as a good and otherwise 
 honestly intentioned man. But if the inner state of 
 mind should be one of hopeless antagonism to the 
 supernatural, one would be disposed to say that it 
 was 'too bad' to remain, and that speaking out and 
 coming out, at any cost, was the duty of the position. 
 
 Bearing in mind that Buchanan carried his life in his 
 hand, and that he had never undertaken the function 
 of religious teacher, only a very heroic person could 
 afford to say that he had not done all he dared, and 
 that he showed himself deeply in earnest about Truth, 
 when at last he had the opportunity, and really c was 
 of gud religion for a poet,' and even for a more hope- 
 ful character. Buchanan, on the intellectual side of 
 him, was not merely a poet, but a wit and humorist 
 a type of mind not in itself easy to harmonise with 
 being of 'gud religion.' Perhaps if the Puritans had 
 not been in so many cases hopelessly wooden, it 
 might have saved their cause from having so many 
 joints in its harness open to the shafts of the satirical 
 sharpshooter, but they would probably not have done 
 so great and grave a work in the world. Dire, how-
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 105 
 
 ever, are the fruits of an igneous temperament and a 
 ligneous intellect, and Praise-God Barebones and Co. 
 have done an evil turn to a good undertaking. The 
 capacity and habit of seeing and enjoying the ludicrous 
 are a temptation to their possessor to forget that life 
 has its serious aspect also, and in too many instances 
 this seems to be forgotten. Hence the presumption is 
 against the laugher until he has become better known. 
 I recollect once hearing a celebrated preacher give a 
 highly comical account of his own conversion, and 
 albeit not given to the frowning mood, I could not 
 help asking myself whether this could be a serious 
 man ; and it was not until I read his life that I saw he 
 knew that there is a time for everything under the 
 sun, and that he possessed the secret of assigning its 
 due claim to all views of life. Buchanan, too, had 
 mastered this power for it requires an effort of will, 
 and there must always be an essential difference 
 between the humorous man's view of religion, and that 
 of the man who cannot show his teeth by way of 
 smile, though Nestor swear the jest be laughable. 
 Buchanan could sparkle when sparkling was in place, 
 but he could also be depended on when grave or even 
 grim work was in request.
 
 io6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Renaissance Morals 
 
 Part of the price paid for the enlightenment of the 
 Renaissance was that in too many instances its breadth 
 of ethical as well as intellectual outlook was allowed 
 by its possessor to sink into a practical licentiousness, 
 open or concealed, that corrupted, or even totally 
 destroyed, the moral and spiritual faculties. I can- 
 not see proof of any such results in Buchanan's case. 
 I think he was careful to secure himself from danger 
 on this side of his temptations. His bitterest 
 detractors do not raise a whisper against him here. 
 But there is a section of his poetry which may best be 
 characterised as of the Ad Nearam, In Leonoram 
 (Lenani), Ad Gelliam, Ad Briandum Vallium pro 
 Lena Apologia order, which has occasioned misgiving 
 to some of his friends. One biographer, a very com- 
 petent authority on this period of Scottish history, 
 says, somewhat severely, that these pieces ought not 
 to have been written by the man who wrote Francis- 
 canus a powerful satire on the vices and hypocrisy 
 of the monks. I must say that, with every deference 
 to a critic highly worthy of respect, I am not able to 
 see it. The Franciscanus was essentially an exposure of 
 dishonesty, not so much of the vices practised under the
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 107 
 
 cowl, as of the shameful trickery of using the cowl to 
 cloak them. As far as honesty and consistency go, there 
 is no reason why an honest and consistent man should 
 not have written every word of these ' Lena ' sketches. 
 Even from an artistic point of view they will stand 
 inspection. The subject, of course, is a revolting one, 
 and so is Dame Quickly but would any man of average 
 robustness of mind wish Dame Quickly unwritten? 
 Many people seem to forget that while the real itself 
 may be unpleasant, the artistic image of the real may 
 be a delight. We should shrink from Caliban in the 
 flesh, but Shakespeare throws a charm over him ; 
 Pandemonium is not, I believe, a sweet scene, but 
 Milton's account of it is sublime; Falstaff was dis- 
 reputable, but he makes an admirable stage figure; 
 a corpse is an unlovely object, but Rembrandt's 
 ' Dissectors ' has a fascination. 
 
 Probably it was for want of noting this distinction 
 that the late Principal Shairp, who was a good judge of 
 a certain class of poetry, lamented that Burns should 
 have written Holy Willie's Prayer and the Jolly Beggars ! 
 a remark which led Louis Stevenson, in a compassion- 
 ating way, to hint that Burns was perhaps too ' burly ' 
 a figure for the Principal's microscope. There is a 
 good deal of this ' burliness ' in Buchanan's Leonoras, 
 which in point of graphic power are second only to
 
 io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the Jolly Beggars, while their savage and even hideous 
 realism, contrasting with the elegance of the Latin line, 
 produce a piquant effect from the mere point of view 
 of art. But I demur to any suggestion that these or 
 any of Buchanan's so-called 'amorous' poetry are 
 corrupting or intended to be, or that they exhibit any 
 gloating over the degrading or the degraded on the 
 part of the writer. From references in them I believe 
 they were satires written for the warning of 'college' 
 youth, and resembled certain passages in the Book of 
 Proverbs and elsewhere in the Bible, where certain 
 counsels, highly necessary and practical, are conveyed 
 in language not deficient either in directness or detail. 
 They could not possibly scandalise or tempt any one, 
 being written in Latin. Mr. Podsnap and the ' young 
 person ' would pass equally scatheless, for they could 
 not read them. Only men who could construe and 
 scan Horace could understand them, and these might 
 be trusted to see their true drift. Then the Ad 
 Gelliam verses were merely playful little satires upon 
 ladies who painted, or wore brass rings and glass gems, 
 which might amuse readers, while producing no effect, 
 good or evil, upon their subjects. As to the Neczra 
 series, they are not love-poems at all, but epigrams. 
 There is no passion, sensuous or otherwise, in them. 
 What show of manufactured emotion there may be is
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 109 
 
 simply a stage-scaffolding on which to plant and fire off 
 the epigram. Probably the best known of the series 
 is the following : 
 
 ' Ilia mihi semper praesenti dura Neaera, 
 
 Me quoties absum semper abesse dolet ; 
 Non desiderio nostri, non moeret amore, 
 Sed se non nostro posse dolore frui' ; 
 
 which James Hannay, who was well able to appreciate 
 this class of work, translated thus : 
 
 ' Neaera is harsh at our every greeting, 
 
 Whene'er I am absent, she wants me again ; 
 'Tis not that she loves me, or cares for our meeting, 
 She misses the pleasure of seeing my pain ' ; 
 
 adding that ' Menage used to say that he would have 
 given his best benefice to have written the lines and 
 Manage held some fat ones.' What anchorite could 
 discover anything exceptionable here, or if he had any 
 intelligence left, could fail to perceive that it was simply 
 a case for admiring extreme cleverness of thought and 
 smartness of phrase? If any one desires to see how 
 Buchanan could appreciate and address the highest 
 type of womanhood, let him read such verses as the 
 Ad Mildredam or the Ad Camillam Morelliam, and 
 he will see that he was a man with tenderness in him 
 as well as virility, with grace as well as severity of 
 speech ; and the fact that in his maturer years he was
 
 no FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 not ashamed to publish the incriminated poetry, showed 
 that he was not conscious of anything to be ashamed 
 of, that he knew the poet's dominion was conterminous 
 with the whole range of things, and no part of it what- 
 ever exempt from his critical or sympathetic function, 
 while his fiercest or lightest dealing with the facts of 
 life is in no way inconsistent with a profound and silent 
 veneration in presence of the mystery of existence.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS 
 Earlier and Continental 
 
 BUCHANAN was born early in February 1506, at Moss 
 or Mid-Leowen, on the Blane Water, about two miles 
 south-east of Killearn in Stirlingshire, of a 'family 
 ancient rather than opulent,' as he tells us in his Auto- 
 biography^ so that he was delivered from the peasant 
 or upstart consciousness which, except in the priesthood, 
 would, in those feudal times, have handicapped him 
 heavily in the race of life. His real and Scoto-Irish 
 clan name was Macauslan, but the Macauslan having 
 acquired the lands of Buchanan in the Lennox, took 
 the name of his property, and became Buchanan of 
 that Ilk; and thus it came to pass that our George 
 ranked as a 'cadet of Buchanan,' as Hannay was 
 proud and particular to specify. Ancient lineage, 
 however, is no insurance against misfortune, and the 
 Buchanans of Moss, never rich, sank into deep poverty. 
 
 The father died in George's youth, and the grandfather 
 
 111
 
 ii2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 who survived him was a waster and became a bankrupt, 
 and Agnes Heriot, the mother, was left to struggle with 
 the upbringing of five sons and three daughters a task 
 however, which she successfully accomplished, like the 
 heroine she was, as her most distinguished son grate- 
 fully commemorates. Having never known wealth or 
 luxury, perhaps it was easier for Buchanan to reconcile 
 himself to their opposites in after years. In the Lennox 
 they talked Gaelic, and Buchanan picked up that speech 
 to begin with. He would also learn some Scotch or 
 Northern English from his mother, who came from 
 Haddingtonshire, and in addition she was careful to 
 have him sent to the schools in the neighbourhood, 
 where he could learn the elements of Latin. 
 
 For the old Church had not entirely neglected 
 popular education, as has been shown, in a very inter- 
 esting way, in Grant's Burgh Schools of Scotland, and 
 as, indeed, appears on the face of the Reformers' First 
 Book of Discipline itself (1560). Most of the burghs 
 maintained schools, both secondary and elementary, 
 so that the barons and freeholders who were ordered 
 by the celebrated Act of James iv. (1494) to keep their 
 heirs at school until they had learned ' perfyt Latyn ' 
 then the international language of the educated and 
 of diplomacy had abundant opportunity of doing so 
 had they chosen, although unfortunately they too seldom
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 113 
 
 chose ; so that the burgh schools were largely recruit- 
 ing-grounds for the priesthood. There were also 
 elementary Church schools, in many cases taught by 
 women, and private adventure schools ; and in these 
 a considerable number of the children of the poor were 
 taught at least to read. Accordingly, when it is said 
 that Knox and the Reformers established the Scottish 
 Parish School system, a little discrimination must be 
 exercised. They did not invent popular education 
 they found it; but they did invent, on paper, in the 
 First Book of Discipline, the idea of bringing education 
 to the people's doors, by securing that there should be 
 a school wherever there was a ' kirk ' that is, practically 
 in every parish ; so that ' the youth-head and tender 
 children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue, 
 in presence of their friends, by whose good attendance 
 many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the 
 youth commonly fall, either by over much libertie 
 which they have in strange and unknowne places, while 
 they cannot rule themselves ; or else for lack of good 
 attendance, and of such necessaries as their tender age 
 requires.' 
 
 So far the Book of Discipline, at once recognising 
 
 an existing educational system, and suggesting, for 
 
 reason given, the vital improvement of its national 
 
 application ! The whole scheme, indeed, is admirable, 
 
 H
 
 ii 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 including as it does compulsion, the picking out and, 
 in the case of the poor, supporting the class of youth 
 suited for the higher kinds of service to society, while 
 the others not so gifted ' must be set to some handie 
 craft, or to some other profitable exercise ' that is, 
 technical education, or some other form of practical 
 training. I have said ' on paper,' but not by way of 
 sneer, and ought to add in passing, that it was not the 
 fault of Knox and his associates that it remained to a 
 great extent merely 'on paper,' instead of being im- 
 mediately and effectually established. It was the fault 
 and the disgrace of a different type of men. Knox, as 
 I have already said, was a politician, and made dexterous 
 use of the ' Lords of the Congregation ' to secure the 
 triumph of Protestantism. But these ' Lords of the Con- 
 gregation ' were politicians also, and made an equally 
 dexterous use of Knox to fill their own pockets with 
 Church spoil I except a few, who were really noble 
 men. They gave little for parish churches, and nothing 
 that I ever heard of for parish schools. The whole 
 thing broke poor Knox's heart. It did not ruffle 
 Buchanan, although he was probably the greatest 
 educational enthusiast in Europe at the moment. But 
 he was really a greater intelligence and a calmer master 
 of himself than Knox, and probably knew that any one 
 who expects to find more than twenty-five per cent. if
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 115 
 
 so much of the race as existing at any given moment 
 worthy of intellectual or moral respect, must either 
 have had little experience of life, or possess a very low 
 standard of human excellence. 
 
 Not till 1696 was the plan of the Book of Discipline 
 adumbrated in legislation, and the successors of the 
 ' Lords of the Congregation ' bound by law to provide 
 a school-house and a salaried teacher in every parish. 
 But during the whole of the intervening century and 
 a third, the Presbyterian clergy never ceased in their 
 efforts, and often their sacrifices, for popular education, 
 while at the same time fighting a steady battle for liberty 
 against as mean and cruel a crusade of Absolutist 
 Monarchy and Ecclesiastical Tyranny as ever was 
 preached by a ridiculous and pedant Peter against 
 a self-respecting people. For myself, I fail to find 
 much of the theology of the Covenanters credible 
 although I must say I should like if we could hear 
 Knox and Melville, or even Cameron and Cargill, on 
 the existing state of things. I think we should get 
 some different guidance from what we are receiving 
 from those blind leaders of the blind who shiveringly 
 and stammeringly attempt to fill their places. For it 
 is almost impossible to appraise too highly the service 
 done by the Covenanters for the cause of liberty and 
 popular education ; and although they had their very
 
 n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 obvious faults, one is always sorry to think that the 
 aristocratic and Episcopalian prejudices of Scott should 
 have led him to hold them up to ridicule, while glad 
 that a higher and juster view was taken by a greater 
 Scotsman even than Scott, when, in answer to a con- 
 temptuous critic of the men of the Covenant, Burns 
 turned on him with the withering impromptu : 
 
 ' The Solemn League and Covenant 
 
 Cost Scotland blood cost Scotland tears 
 But it sealed Freedom's sacred cause 
 If thou'rt a slave, indulge thy sneers.' 1 
 
 We go back to young George Buchanan (1517-19) 
 at the Catholic local grammar-school of Killearn or 
 Dumbarton, or wherever else in the neighbourhood 
 secondary education was to be had. The boy had 
 shown such aptitude that his uncle, James Heriot, who 
 is said to have been Justiciar of Lothian, sent him to 
 the University of Paris, then, though not quite so much 
 as at an earlier date, enjoying the reputation of the most 
 notable of any seat of learning in existence. Instead of 
 
 1 Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus : 
 
 ' The Solemn League and Covenant 
 
 Now brings a smile, now brings a tear ; 
 But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs : 
 If thou 'rt a slave, indulge thy sneer. ' 
 
 The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 117 
 
 being required to pass through the preparatory school, he 
 at once began his studies in the Arts faculty (1520, age 
 fourteen), his Scottish acquirements having apparently 
 been sufficient to pass him through whatever entrance 
 examination was imperative. Here he spent about 
 two years, working mainly at Latin versification, which, 
 as his reputation for Latin poetry was to be the 
 making of him in after years, was perhaps the best 
 thing he could do, especially as he liked it. At this 
 point, as evil fate would have it, his uncle died, and 
 he himself fell ill. But as he was penniless, he had 
 to struggle home, illness and all, as best he could, 
 and was not able to move about again for a year or 
 thereabouts (1523). And then it turned out that a 
 very singular purpose had entered the mind of the 
 ill or convalescent student of seventeen. 
 
 {Here ends Dr. Wallace's MS.] 
 
 That purpose was to enlist as a volunteer in an 
 army for the invasion of England, to be led by the 
 Regent Albany, who had supposed wrongs of his own 
 as well as of the borders to avenge against that old 
 neighbour and untiring enemy. That army, consist- 
 ing of French auxiliaries and Scottish recruits, marched 
 to Melrose and then partly crossed the Tweed by a
 
 n8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 wooden bridge, then, holding Flodden in memory, 
 intimated a mutinous resolution not to cross the 
 border, then marched down the left bank of the 
 river, and for three days besieged Wark Castle to 
 little effect, then made a sudden night-march to 
 Lauder in a snowstorm, 'which told heavily on man 
 and beast,' and reduced Buchanan to very bad health 
 for the rest of the winter. Buchanan, when he came 
 to write his own life in his old age, had come to 
 believe that he joined this abortive expedition to 
 learn the art of war, which, without intentions more 
 far-seeing than those of a lad of eighteen, he certainly 
 did, just as Gibbon was educated to understand the 
 evolution of the phalanx and the legions, by what 
 he saw, in his two and a half years' captaincy of the 
 Hampshire Militia, of the evolutions of a modern 
 battalion. In the spring of 1525 Buchanan appeared 
 as a ' pauper student ' at the University of St. Andrews, 
 doubtless specially well qualified both as a student 
 and as a 'pauper' which epithet 'pauper,' however, 
 meant probably nothing more opprobrious than a 
 youth who required board and education free, like 
 many a score of St. Andrews students, from poet 
 Buchanan to poet Fergusson, who about two and a 
 half centuries later sat at the bursar's free table and 
 said grace over the too plentiful college rabbits that
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 119 
 
 were last century procured from the links that now 
 swarm only with golfers. He was sent there, he tells 
 in his Autobiography \ to 'sit at the feet of John 
 Major,' the celebrated logician of that age; but he 
 did not long sit at his feet as pupil before he felt 
 in a position to criticise his master as a teacher of 
 sophistry rather than logic. Next summer, having 
 taken the St. Andrews B.A. degree, he followed or 
 accompanied Major to Paris, and there passed through 
 two years' adversity under pressure of poverty and 
 the suspicion of not being an orthodox Papist. 
 Fortune relaxed her frown, and he was admitted to 
 the College of Ste. Barbe, in which he was Professor 
 of Grammar for three years. Meanwhile Gilbert 
 Kennedy, the young Earl of Cassilis, one of the 
 earliest of Scottish hero-worshippers, had the insight 
 to appreciate his learning and genius, and the devo- 
 tion to adhere to him as friend, pupil, and protector 
 for five years. In 1533, the tutor dedicated to the 
 pupil his translation of Linacre's Grammar, one of 
 the items of work done by him during his professor- 
 ship in the College of Ste. Barbe; and in 1558, after 
 this pupil, who had held a prominent position among 
 Scottish nobles, died, probably from poison, at Dieppe, 
 on his way home from the marriage of Mary Stuart 
 to the Dauphin, along with the other three Scottish
 
 izo FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 commissioners who had attended it, Buchanan cele- 
 brated him in emphatic Latin verse that is now better 
 known than most contemporary epitaphs. Let it be 
 told, however, to illustrate the cross-threads that run 
 through the web of life, that Queen Mary, on gih 
 October 1564, granted to Buchanan, who had been 
 her tutor also, and probably the most learned and 
 intellectual of all her friends, a pension of ^500 
 Scots, or ^25 sterling a year, from the Abbey of 
 Crossraguel; that the then Earl of Cassilis, son of 
 Buchanan's old pupil, claimed the temporalities of 
 that abbey as his own, and sometimes stopped tem- 
 porarily, and often permanently diminished, the pension 
 which had been granted by the Queen out of the 
 spoils of the Reformation, tarnishing by pious Pro- 
 testant greed the brightest page in the history of the 
 earldom of Cassilis. 
 
 After Buchanan's tutorship of the father of this 
 grasping Protestant was ended, and Buchanan was 
 proposing to return to his old scholar's life in Paris, 
 James v. detained him to act as tutor to one of 
 his natural sons not the one known afterwards 
 as the Good Regent, but James Stewart, Prior of 
 Coldingham. This king, who entertained the idea 
 that the clergy ought not to disregard the moral 
 law as if they were royal personages like himself, set
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 121 
 
 Buchanan to the not uncongenial task, upon which 
 Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay of the Mount had 
 previously been engaged, of 'lashing the vices' of 
 the clergy, and especially of the monks. In the form 
 of a dream, Somnium, he represented to St. Francis 
 the reasons of a decent man for refusing to enter this 
 order of sainthood reasons which, because of their 
 truth, might satisfy a saint, but which also, because 
 of their truth, would likely be disagreeable to sancti- 
 fied hypocrites and scoundrels. Two palinodes, wear- 
 ing the aspect of apologies, were seen by those who 
 understood irony to be rather stinging aggravations 
 of the original satire. After some months of a mixed 
 tumult of priestly rage and secular laughter, the royal 
 love of fun and of virtue again prompted Buchanan 
 to renew the attack, which he did by beginning 
 Franciscanus, not published till 1560, and then 
 dedicated to the Regent Moray and gradually ex- 
 tended to a thousand Latin lines, which contain the 
 most polished, skilfully contemptuous exposure of 
 the arts, ignorance, and vices of the later generations 
 of the Romish clergy in Scotland. It is still worth 
 reading by all who enjoy rough, boisterous, coarse 
 humour, as also by all anti-Papist fanatics, even if 
 they should renew their Latin studies for nine months 
 to enable them to understand and utilise it. These
 
 122 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 men, drenched with satire, published and unpublished, 
 whose craft of various hues was endangered by it, of 
 course thought that it would be judicious if not just 
 to burn its author. Cardinal Beaton had him on his 
 list of heretics, for what heresy could be so dangerous 
 as disbelief in the solid, well-fed, red-faced exponents 
 of infallible truth ? In 1539 he escaped from prison 
 in Edinburgh 1 when his guards were asleep. But 
 being warned after the King had received the MS. of 
 The Franciscan that Beaton had offered this fickle 
 monarch a price for his head, he felt constrained to bid 
 farewell once more to his native country. He fled 
 to England, but, as Henry vm. was then busy burn- 
 ing all shades of believers that did not suit his 
 personal fancy, Buchanan thought it prudent to trust 
 his safety and his fortunes once more to Paris. On 
 arriving there, however, he found that Cardinal Beaton 
 was there before him as ambassador, so on the invita- 
 tion of Andrew Gouvea he withdrew to Bordeaux. 
 There he taught three years at least in the public 
 schools, and wrote four tragedies for the annual ex- 
 hibitions of these schools, to wit The Baptist, Medea, 
 Jepthes, and Alcestis. In the College of Guyenne he 
 had Gouve'a as a principal, and as a pupil Montaigne, 
 
 1 My authority is Herkless's Cardinal Beaton, p. 1 53.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 123 
 
 the celebrated sceptic, who is dogmatic enough to 
 state in one of his essays that Gouve'a was 'without 
 comparison the chiefest rector in France,' and that 
 he himself had, as a principal actor, 'undergone and 
 represented the chiefest parts in the Latin Tragedies of 
 Buchanan.' When here, Beaton and the Franciscans 
 harassed him until that fear was dispelled by the 
 plague raging over Aquitaine and the death of his 
 fickle patron, the King of Scots. 
 
 Next, about 1547, in the wake or under the convoy 
 of Gouve'a, he migrated to Portugal in response to the 
 invitation of the King to teach in a resuscitation of the 
 University of Coimbra that was being then worked 
 out at great expense for education in the liberal arts 
 and the philosophy of Aristotle. Many of his friends, 
 eminent for learning, were there before him, and he 
 expected to find peace in that out of the way corner of 
 the world. But Gouve'a died suddenly, and then all 
 his enemies ran at him with open mouth. He was 
 thrown into prison, charged with writing against the 
 Franciscans and eating flesh in Lent. The Inquisitors 
 tormented themselves and him for six months without 
 stateable result; and then, thinking it prudent, and 
 perhaps honest, to conceal that their toil had been 
 in vain, they shut him up in a monastery to be con- 
 verted to the true faith or to be prepared for the
 
 124 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 fagots. To the great scholar, however, the monks, 
 though ignorant, behaved not unkindly. They allowed 
 him the truest literary leisure and quiet he ever had 
 except perhaps in St. Andrews ; and he devoted it to 
 the so-called translation of David's Psalms into Latin 
 verse, which are in truth artistic evolutionary exposi- 
 tions from Hebrew hints, or splendid blossoms of sacred 
 poetry grown from the seed given by the poet-king 
 of Israel to the winds of heaven, in the moments of 
 inspiration occurring in a life of suffering, of passion, 
 and of hope. Never elsewhere did the iron fetters of 
 Buchanan's own environment permit him to soar so 
 close to the firmament. 
 
 When set at liberty, though the King of Portugal 
 offered him the means of subsistence, he returned to 
 England. But as affairs were then in disorder under 
 a young king, he in a short time returned to France 
 and celebrated the siege of Metz in a Latin poem, not 
 without the approbation which rewarded all his efforts 
 in that line of composition. Thereafter the Marshal 
 de Brissac called him to Italy, and he lived with him 
 and his son in Italy and France for four years till 1560, 
 spending much time in writing his poem De Sphara, 
 and in study of the religious controversies then seeth- 
 ing through civilised Europe, and carrying it into a 
 scientific region that rendered a poetic exposition of
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 125 
 
 the Ptolemaic system a work of futility and utterly 
 misspent power. 
 
 In 1561 he returned to his native country, and there 
 indicated his Rationalistic leanings to the side of 
 Protestantism. Nevertheless, the non-Protestant Mary 
 Stuart, of ever-living memory in the realm of history 
 and romance, pursued her studies in Livy and other 
 classics with his help. As formerly mentioned, she 
 endowed him with a pension of ^500 a year. But in 
 after years Mary's faults or her misfortunes threw them 
 into the hostile camps that tore Scotland into con- 
 fusion and deadly discord. In regard to the murder of 
 Darnley, he came to the conclusion, on the evidence 
 of open foes and of professed friends, that she was 
 guilty. He preferred truth to the beautiful queen, and 
 it is difficult to comprehend how any man capable 
 of weighing and scrutinising such evidence as was 
 accessible to him can blame him. 1 
 
 1 My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes 
 with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too 
 unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being 
 1 art and part ' in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, 
 the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ' Not 
 Proven ' ; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant ' served him 
 right.' Skelton's clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Leth- 
 ington, Mary's most faithful and capable minister, does not throw 
 much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an oppo- 
 sition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know
 
 126 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Buchanan has been accused of ingratitude to Mary, 
 his friend as well as his mistress, divinely gifted and 
 divinely appointed. He may have been compelled to 
 seem ungrateful through the lying of ill-informed 
 Reformers and rogues ; but sure am I that his Latin 
 and other Humanist studies with that most fascinating 
 and accomplished of women, or at least of queens, gave 
 him the opportunity of forming an idea of her intel- 
 lectual powers and unsurpassed personal charms that 
 no other contemporary in Scotland was mentally and 
 morally capable of forming, and I don't doubt that 
 this idea finds sincere expression in his dedication to 
 her of his version or paraphrase of the Psalms of the 
 Hebrew poet-king, without any hint whatever of kindred 
 
 all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other 
 purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably 
 did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities 
 to come to know it, e.g. in regard to the ' Casket Letters ' docu- 
 ments that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a 
 Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan's attack, in a pamphlet written 
 in Scotch, upon Skelton's hero Maitland, entitled The Chameleon, 
 Skelton sneers at as a ' Dawb ' not entirely an inaccurate criticism, 
 for The Chameleon is a caricature, and that, of course, means an 
 exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a 
 ' chameleon ' like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found 
 in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is 
 assailed by satirists in Punch or elsewhere, the only effective con- 
 demnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not 
 recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my 
 part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the 
 whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 127 
 
 royal frailties, or of tendencies thereto. What Buchanan 
 must have seen in her when he had the best opportunity 
 of sight and knowledge stands recorded unalterably in 
 his noble verse that rolls down the centuries, bearing 
 an impress of insight and sincerity unequalled in the 
 poetical portraiture of queens till Tennyson laid his 
 dedication at the feet of the most illustrious and 
 fortunate of all her countless descendants. A true 
 poet I believe to be a true seer, and incapable of false- 
 hood to the extent that he has had the chance to see. 
 But a true poet may be deceived. Spenser and Shake- 
 speare were deceived into uttering gross flatteries about 
 Queen Elizabeth ; but they were deceived by the dense 
 atmosphere of lying by which one of the cleverest, 
 falsest, most hateful of women of all history encom- 
 passed herself. That Queen Mary should have been 
 no worse than she was in a world with her royal cousin 
 and rival flaunting her fictitious moral and physical 
 beauties at the head of it, and getting prematurely 
 canonised as the Good Queen Bess, ought certainly 
 to qualify or blot out for ever all that can be stated 
 truly and justly in condemnation or even grave censure 
 of Queen Mary. Therefore let the modest and honest 
 muse of History cease howling and canting about her 
 crimes, and try to refrain from lavishing eulogy upon 
 her kindred in position and in blood Henry vin., the
 
 128 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Royal Bluebeard, and his inconstant, cruel, deceitful 
 daughter a pair of monarchs whose fickle affections 
 led so many adventurous wives and ambitious wooers to 
 the scaffold, by processes that involved the partial but 
 temporary corruption of their country's conscience. 
 
 The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan 
 with many a call of duty, and cast upon him loads of 
 multifarious work, such as perhaps never in the history 
 of human-kind before were thrown upon the most 
 accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks 
 assigned to Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon 
 him, reflect no inconsiderable honour and credit 
 upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised countrymen. 
 While still friendly with Queen Mary, he gave effect 
 to his Reformation convictions, by sitting and working 
 for years, from 1563 onwards, as a member of the 
 new-born democratic General Assembly, knowing well 
 enough that it was an institution that the Queen would 
 have been happy to see strangled, even before it began 
 to discuss the scandals of Rizzio and Darnley with 
 the plain-spoken impudence of a rustic kirk-session 
 and the arrogance of an infallible tribunal. Buchanan 
 was one of the Commissioners that revised the Book of 
 Discipline, and, along with Knox and others, was a 
 member of a committee appointed to confer regarding 
 the causes that fell, or that ought to fall, within the
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 129 
 
 jurisdiction of the Kirk. In 1567, a few days after 
 the beginning of Mary's imprisonment in Lochleven, 
 Buchanan filled the chair of the Moderator of the 
 General Assembly, a position that for generations has 
 not called for the worldly wisdom and terse, im- 
 patient talk of a layman, and seldom, if ever, so 
 much required to be reminded of the limits of its 
 power and jurisdiction as when Buchanan sat as 
 its Moderator, and the head of the State was a 
 captive. 
 
 In the previous year, Queen Mary's half-brother, 
 the Earl of Moray, commendator of the Priory of St. 
 Andrews, and as such patron of the Principalship of 
 St. Leonard's College there, appointed Buchanan to 
 that office, which he held for four years. During these 
 years St. Leonard's, which in the first year was student- 
 less, became the best attended of the three St. Andrews 
 colleges. But the fame of the 'greatest poet of the 
 age ' could not permanently revive the fortunes of St. 
 Leonard's, nor did the efforts of the Parliamentary 
 Commission of 1579, of which Andrew Melville as 
 well as Buchanan were members. By the time Dr. 
 Johnson was on his way to the Hebrides, the College 
 buildings were ruinous and forsaken, including St. 
 Leonard's Church, of which the Doctor could not see 
 the inside, because of decent excuses exciting in his 
 
 I
 
 1 30 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 mind the hope that ' Where there is still shame there 
 may yet be virtue.' 1 
 
 The Regent Moray, Buchanan's patron and friend, 
 to whom the Franciscanus was dedicated, was a recog- 
 nised mainstay of Protestantism, heartily hated by the 
 allies of the Queen and of the Pope. He was assassin- 
 ated in Linlithgow on 2oth January 1570, partly to 
 further their interests and partly to gratify private 
 revenge. Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was waiting for 
 him in the house of his uncle, Archbishop Hamilton, 
 with small-bore matchlock and lighted match, and the 
 accident of a crowded street gave him the opportunity 
 of a deliberate aim. His death was laid at the door 
 of the Hamiltons, and it stirred the patriotism of 
 Buchanan to write a political pamphlet, called an 
 Admonition to the Trew Lordes^ in the vernacular of 
 
 1 Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of 
 St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. 
 Leonard's roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast- 
 party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that 
 his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan's old dwelling- 
 house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall 
 thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan's day. Dr. John- 
 son's general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence 
 in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of the genitts loci 
 of St. Leonard's so far as to prevent his generously recognising 
 Buchanan's claim to immortality as being as fair as modern 
 Latinity can give, and ' perhaps fairer than the instability of verna- 
 cular languages admit. '
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 131 
 
 Scotland, directed against the Hamilton s and their 
 friends a publication full of practical insight, good 
 sense, and cogent argument, the work of a wise, earnest, 
 sagacious man, who in the zeal for the good of his 
 country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration, 
 in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton 
 when he too became a political pamphleteer, more 
 rhapsodical than relevant. He suspected the Hamil- 
 tons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan 
 very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, 
 whose birth he had welcomed as a star of hope for his 
 country. His birthday ode of welcome, ostensibly 
 intended for the boy when he grew up, but positively 
 in the meantime for the guidance and the warning of 
 his mother, is in substance a serious homily on the duty 
 of kings to God and the people, from whom their 
 power came, and whose will and welfare alone justified 
 its exercise. The essence of the De Jure Regni under- 
 lies it, an essence never practically intelligible to the 
 fated House of Stuart. Neither the beautiful, brilliant 
 Mary nor her erratic but not stupid race could under- 
 stand the teaching of Buchanan as an exposition of 
 the law of the King of kings. The fate of that race, 
 from her flight to England to the flight from Culloden, 
 has helped the world to understand it. They were 
 doomed to be born in and live through ages of ignor-
 
 132 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 ance, superstition, and falsehood, in which few men 
 arose who could discover and recognise truth and 
 publish it at their risk for the dark here and the darker 
 hereafter, as was done by Buchanan. He may not 
 have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and 
 courage, the like of which will never be exhibited by 
 his traducers to the end of time. Those who can 
 believe him guilty of base ingratitude and malicious 
 falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best 
 from the worst in human nature and in human 
 history. 
 
 Buchanan's truthfulness and resolute desire to be 
 impartial can be best inferred in our time from his 
 History of Scotland, at which he had written for years, 
 and for which he had collected materials from his boy- 
 hood. The style of it appears to be an eclectic adapta- 
 tion of available and appropriate elements from the 
 styles of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. It wants the 
 special charm of ' Livy's pictured page,' for Scottish 
 places, deeds, heroes, and tastes did not for Buchanan's 
 earnest, realistic, dialectical, judicial mind present in- 
 ducements to poetic word-painting indeed, it was 
 after his day, before the fascinations of the picturesque 
 dawned upon the mind of Scotland, unless it may have 
 been to some semi-mythical, mist-inspired member of 
 the tribe of Ossian. The speeches of his History are the
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 133 
 
 most tersely expressed, forcibly reasoned specimens of 
 ancient Scottish oratory, assuming, of course, that they 
 ought to have been delivered, but that they never were. 
 They want the terse, pregnant suggestiveness of the 
 orations of Tacitus ; but they may probably appear to 
 be not less skilfully adapted for the dramatic surround- 
 ings in which they are supposed to have been delivered. 
 Young students of Latin, especially in the Aberdeen 
 region, have found it to be for their interest to read 
 and re-read Buchanan's History, and it is in the 
 original that the literary art and linguistic skill of its 
 author can be best seen. But it is still worth reading, 
 and is often read in Dr. Watkins' translation, which as 
 a translation reflects a good deal more credit upon its 
 author than his old-womanly, newspapery but not dis- 
 honest attempt at original historical composition shown 
 in his bringing down of Buchanan's masterly story to 
 the culmination or extinction of Scottish history in 
 the visit of George iv. to Edinburgh. The babes 
 and sucklings of the school of Dry-as-dust assert that 
 Buchanan is superseded as an historian ; but a man of 
 Buchanan's powers and opportunities can never be ; 
 superseded as a narrator of the history of his own 
 time. 
 
 Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few 
 days or weeks after his History had been published.
 
 134 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 He had striven, in spite of old age, ill-health, and 
 poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic 
 task ; and when he had corrected the proofs and given 
 it to the world, he felt that his last slender tie to life 
 was broken, and his long, chequered, poorly-paid day's 
 work was done. 
 
 His death took place in Kennedy's Close, the second 
 close off the High Street of Edinburgh above the 
 Tron Church, as recorded by 'George Paton, 
 Antiquary,' upon the rather reliable authority of an 
 ancient Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Good- 
 trees. 
 
 His last lodging was in ' the first house in the turn- 
 pike above the tavern,' and occupied some few cubic 
 feet of space, probably about twelve feet above the 
 existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an entirely 
 vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated 
 masonry, part of the crest of the High Street once, 
 standing within a quarter of a mile of the vanished 
 garden in which Darnley was found dead in his shirt 
 without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of 
 the vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, 
 and to the vacant air-space once filled by Johnny 
 Bowie's vanished tavern, in which during his Edinburgh 
 sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with 
 select friends.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 135 
 
 The records of the Commissary Court show that 
 Buchanan left no property except ;ioo of his Cross- 
 raguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and withheld as 
 often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis), 
 which had been in arrear from the previous Whit- 
 sunday. His ' Inventar ' exhibits him in his true 
 character of an ancient philosopher, whether Stoic or 
 not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from 
 time immemorial have been ready and willing to bury 
 scholars, buried his body the day after his death at 
 the public expense. The ground of Greyfriars, one 
 of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being 
 turned into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the ' 
 ' first person of celebrity ' buried in it. The exact 
 spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt, though a 
 small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to 
 mark where it is believed to be a tribute of hero- 
 worship like to that in Parliament Square which is 
 supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox. 
 
 It is not likely that Buchanan ever asked the Town 
 Council of Edinburgh for bread, but it is believed that 
 they gave him a stone without any inscription, how- 
 ever, to show for whom it was intended, so that by 
 1701 it was lost or stolen. His skull also is believed 
 to be one of the lawful and sacred possessions of the 
 Edinburgh University. If genuine, it may be a
 
 136 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 phrenological curiosity. Sir W. Hamilton once used 
 it at a lecture which was listened to and approved of 
 by Thomas Carlyle. Sir William demonstrated to 
 Carlyle's satisfaction that the said skull, supposed to 
 be Buchanan's, was according to phrenological dogmas 
 far inferior to that of some ' Malay cut-throat' or other 
 unredeemed ruffian. Assuming this to be the fact 
 and my authority for believing it is a letter of Carlyle 
 published in Veitch's Life of Sir W. Hamilton I am 
 surprised that Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton were 
 not converted to phrenology. But for my part, 
 believing in the universal but mostly untranslatable 
 symbolism of Nature, from the ' flower in the crannied 
 wall ' to the human face and form divine, and believing 
 only to a limited extent in phrenology as the dark side 
 of physiognomy that is open to touch rather than to 
 sight, I should hold that the skull which was inferior 
 to a Malay's in any respect except thickness could 
 never be the skull of Buchanan ; and it would not 
 alter my conviction to feel sure that George Combe 
 was present at Sir William Hamilton's lecture, and for 
 the first and only time in their career of phrenological 
 disputation expressly agreed with him. Whatever 
 Buchanan's head and face may have been like and 
 his portraits impute to him either sleepy, benevolent 
 dulness, or ferrety, peevish conceit it is not believable
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 137 
 
 that his head or face could have ever resembled that 
 of a Malay or any other kind of savage. So acute a 
 logician as Sir W. Hamilton ought to have doubted 
 one of his premises at least, and been able to conceive 
 it possible that the resetters of dead men's skulls may 
 be sometimes the victims of outside, as well as inside, 
 deception.
 
 EPILOGISTIC 
 
 THE sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has 
 left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being 
 completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts 
 are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every 
 biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion 
 of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be 
 unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from 
 everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring 
 reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find else- 
 where ; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. 
 Wallace's ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the 
 life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew 
 under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to 
 be not so much an articulation of the bare bones of 
 fact as a narrative of the genesis, evolution, growth, 
 and vitality of Buchanan's ideas, more especially his 
 ideas affecting social democratic development, and in 
 particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but 
 vital for the race, touching the ' rights of man.' 
 
 138
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 139 
 
 Few men of any country have had such versatility of 
 talent, and have in life found tasks so varied as George 
 Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No other Scotsman 
 known to me, through credible report or in the flesh, 
 has had the personal experience that would enable him 
 so well to understand and interpret the personal 
 experience of George Buchanan. Both were pre- 
 eminent in the university learning of their respective 
 eras, which had little in common except Latin; 
 scholastic logic and metaphysic being the dominating 
 study of Buchanan's days, as inductive positive science 
 is of ours. Both were wandering scholars seeking for 
 fortune, or at least for bread ; each acting as tutor, 
 schoolmaster, university professor, man of letters, 
 theologian, politician, and teacher of public men 
 who were too ignorant or too neglectful of honest 
 rational principle to be fit to rule in mercy and in 
 justice ; both were doomed by circumstances or by 
 conscience to poverty and the discrediting influences 
 of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable light and 
 guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre- 
 Reformation church was a kinder, less harsh nursing- 
 mother to the inquiring, doubting, hesitating, satirical 
 Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses of ultra- 
 Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere 
 worship of nothing except Mammon's golden calf were
 
 140 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 to the learned literary man of our day who, afflicted 
 with distracting doubts himself, and many sorrows, 
 could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme 
 Creator and an administrator of the universe accord- 
 ing to fixed law and unswerving right, and could help 
 to lift the mind of his age out of a darkness deeper 
 than Popery the blackness of atheistic despair. Both 
 knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of 
 churches or religious sects, and the strife of factions 
 intriguing and fighting for power to govern or to mis- 
 govern. The politics familiar to Buchanan included 
 the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the 
 murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent 
 Moray, and Queen Mary, and that often imperilled 
 his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by his years and 
 assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work 
 was done, a fortnight after his History of his country 
 was published, and before his old pupil the Scottish 
 Solomon had time to discover all the treason it con- 
 tained ; ordered his servant to give his few last coins to 
 a beggar, and left the care of his funeral to all whom it 
 might concern on Christian, natural, civic, and sanitary 
 grounds, ending his long, busy, chequered tenure of 
 time with that courage and hope which gilds the last 
 sunset of those who have striven to do right and 
 never doubted that God is just.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 141 
 
 There was no man in Scotland or in Europe that 
 could have been of so much service to Scotland in 
 guiding it through the troubles and storms, political, 
 moral, and religious, of the Reformation as Buchanan, 
 if the people of Scotland, more especially the feudal 
 lords of Scotland, had been fit to follow the dictates of 
 the broadest, most complete worldly wisdom, and of 
 the clear conscience of one who had spent his years 
 in study and in poverty, who had lived the life of a 
 stranger to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and 
 the illusions of earthly hope, who had the most of his 
 possible life behind him and eternity in no distant 
 prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to 
 applaud murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate 
 constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of 
 adversity and experience, personal and historical, he 
 was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in 
 dark dogmas and half-explored truths ; he was the man 
 to be a cautious, judicious reformer, not the man to 
 be an impetuous, frantic destroyer, too rash and 
 unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and 
 partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some 
 of them profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords 
 skilled in few arts except the arts of war and theft. 
 Like Erasmus and Beza, he saw that the old order 
 of society was dissolving; but, like all wise men,
 
 i 4 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 he preferred slow and gradual to revolutionary 
 change. 
 
 John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect 
 and reason, was a small man a rash, daring, half- 
 educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Know- 
 ledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox 
 could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. 
 His most indelible historical records are the ruins of 
 cathedrals and other religious houses, 'rooks' nests' 
 requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment 
 of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the 
 ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the 
 Church of Rome was primarily to blame. That Church 
 required reformation, moral and intellectual; but no 
 spiritual entity, however corrupt, can be miraculously 
 reformed by the destruction of Gothic or any other 
 architecture which took its form under the sincere art 
 and piety of buried generations. Cardinal Beaton's 
 mode of burning good true men to support and pre- 
 serve the divine truth that had vitalised his Church 
 for centuries was irrational and infernal ; but it was not 
 very much worse than the mad, destructive fury inspired 
 by John Knox's ' excellent ' sermons, which, whatever 
 their merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind 
 that had any clear comprehension of the processes by 
 which spiritual truth makes its way and holds its
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 143 
 
 power effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox 
 were both powerful in their age and characteristic of 
 it, but they would have found no conspicuous function 
 in an age that was not in the course of emerging from 
 the mire of savagery, with all its tendencies to violence 
 and to vice. Both alike were uncompromising enemies 
 of individual freedom, and equally bent upon the 
 suppression of all conscientious opinions that did not 
 concur with their own. Both were patriots, and of 
 signal service to Scotland ; but the evil they did so 
 nearly counterbalances all the good they did (which 
 might, and would, in time have been done by less un- 
 scrupulous, ungentle instruments), that it might have 
 been well had Scotland been liberated by Providence 
 from the piebald burden of both of them. 1 
 
 Buchanan as a scholar was a very large inheritor 
 of the wisdom of many ages, the largest inheritor of 
 
 1 Carlyle's estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate 
 of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered 
 the verdicts of history ; but it is the estimate of a mind that could 
 discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and 
 who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I 
 believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, 
 and I don't believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to 
 believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics 
 have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not 
 blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him 
 to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy 
 and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal
 
 144 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 that rare kind of wealth of all the Scotsmen of his day. 
 He was by nature somewhat of a sceptic, the teacher in 
 Latin and who can tell what beside ? of Montaigne 
 most candid and sincere of sceptics by necessity a 
 doubter, as true seekers of truth, especially in dark, 
 troubled, fermenting ages, cannot help being. He was 
 a philosopher a Stoic probably, as most impecunious 
 philosophers are compelled to be more or less, capable 
 of bearing the inevitable with patience, and of waiting 
 to solve difficulties by skill and cautious experiment 
 rather than by violence or deceit ! What his worldly 
 wisdom and great intellectual power might have done 
 for the good of his country opens up a wide field of 
 conjecture touching the solution of most of the big 
 problems of his age. Why should the clever, beautiful 
 Queen Mary not have trusted him as an adviser rather 
 than Scotch rakes and traitors and Italian fiddlers? 
 Why should her race, more gifted than most royal 
 races, have hugged a delusion about the Divine right 
 of kings along the precipices overhanging death and 
 ruin ? Why should the Reformers, who had the means 
 of ascertaining that among them he was a veritable 
 
 Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the 
 budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were 
 genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan 
 virtues gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, 
 through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.
 
 GEORGE BUCHANAN 145 
 
 Saul among the prophets, and neither a fanatic nor 
 a hypocrite, not have utilised his wisdom and his 
 inspiration of the beautiful and the true to direct the 
 course and shape the limits of the Reformation, without 
 proclaiming a barbarian, everlasting divorce between 
 the power of truth and the beauty of holiness ? Why 
 should the spiritual force and illumination of every 
 great man who did not wear fine raiment and fare 
 sumptuously every day, of the prophets of Judaea and 
 the sages of Greece and Rome, have been lost upon 
 their contemporaries and left to find its way and its 
 expanding efficacy in the slow course of centuries? 
 Buchanan's lot was the common lot of unendowed, 
 and therefore unappreciated, genius. The greatest 
 scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, 
 one of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy 
 of Europe for all time, he was a rustic in dress, a 
 plain, unpretentious, non-assertive inhabitant of the 
 European villages called cities, known to him as St. 
 Andrews and Edinburgh; a man pure of life in a 
 vicious, half-decent age; loyal to truth so far as it was 
 possible for him to discover it among contemporaries 
 prone to falsehood and ready for the perpetration 
 of it by forgery or any other effective and not un- 
 practicable mode, he was esteemed a stranger in his 
 native land, and not a Solon or a seer except by 
 
 K
 
 146 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the more cultured of his own unlettered generation ; 
 to subsequent vulgar generations he was so unknown 
 or so forgotten as to fill, in their rude Temple of Fame, 
 the niche of a mythical court-jester and coarse wit 
 or witling; nevertheless he holds a title to lasting 
 remembrance as sure as the story of the Reformation 
 and the era of the never-to-be-forgotten Mary Stuart 
 can give; also the unique distinction of being the 
 greatest master of the Latin language since it died as 
 a vernacular, and became the immortal medium of 
 intercommunication for the wide, high, and cold 
 republic of scholars and thinkers, scattered through 
 realms of ether and cloudland, and lit by volcanic fire 
 and spiritual aurora fitfully lifting the night from 
 peaks of rock and ice.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Admonition to Trew Lords, the, 
 
 130. 
 
 /Eschylus, 15. 
 Agamemnon, 15. 
 Arius, 91. 
 
 Ascham, Roger, 81. 
 Atonement, the, 90. 
 Augustine, 99. 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 100. 
 
 Baptistes, the, 57, 58. 
 Beaton, Cardinal, 122, 139. 
 Begging letter-writer, 31. 
 Beza, 81. 
 Boetius, 66, 100. 
 Bordeaux, 58. 
 Brahe, Tycho, 44, 81. 
 Brissac, Marshal of, 51. 
 Brewster, Sir D. , 129. 
 Brown, P. Hume, 18. 
 BUCHANAN, GEORGE 
 
 Writings burned by hangman, 9. 
 
 Milton and Buchanan's Dejure, 
 10. 
 
 Effect of the De Jure, n. 
 
 Relations to the Scaligers, 13. 
 
 Wordsworth on Buchanan, 14. 
 
 Person and Buchanan, 15. 
 
 Milton's opinion of him, 15. 
 
 Hallam's estimate of him, 16. 
 
 Froude's opinion of him, 16. 
 
 Buchanan's scholarship, 17. 
 
 His Detectio Maries Reginiz, 18. 
 
 The Marians and Buchanan, 20. 
 
 The chapbook Buchanan, 21. 
 
 His humour, 22. 
 
 Interview with Melvilles, 23. 
 
 The Countess of Mar and, 25. 
 
 Division of his life into periods 
 of preparation and perform- 
 ance, 27. 
 
 Why he became a Protestant, 
 28. 
 
 Joseph Scaliger's elegy on, 31. 
 
 Begging letter-writer, 31. 
 
 Letters to Mary, Queen of Scots, 
 
 32- 
 
 Letters to Earl of Moray, 32. 
 Comparison between Erasmus 
 
 and, 35. 
 Hospitality of Roman Catholic 
 
 days, 36. 
 His influence on cultured 
 
 Europe, 38. 
 Parallel between his conduct 
 
 and that of to-day, 39. 
 No loss of self-respect, 40. 
 No notoriety hunter, 41. 
 No money grabber, 43. 
 Did not seek power, 48. 
 Dates and aims of his works, 
 
 5- 
 Moderator of General Assembly, 
 
 Si- 
 
 147
 
 148 
 
 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 BUCHANAN, GEORGE, continued 
 
 Various appointments held, 51. 
 
 Aids in drawing up First Book 
 of Discipline, 51. 
 
 Appointed Principal of St. Leo- 
 nard's College, 51. 
 
 Secretary to the Scots Commis- 
 sion re Mary, 51. 
 
 Opinion of Sir James Melville 
 of, 52. 
 
 Not to be blamed for James vi. 's 
 pedantry, 57. 
 
 Dedicates his three great works 
 to the king Baptistes, De 
 Jure, and the History, 57. 
 
 Examination of the Prefaces to 
 these, 58-65. 
 
 Resembled a Scots Stoic philo- 
 sopher, 66. 
 
 His courtly manners, 70. 
 
 Alleged vindictiveness towards 
 Morton disproved, 72. 
 
 His policy regarding Scots 
 affairs, 76. 
 
 Further disproof of Sir J. Mel- 
 ville's remarks, 80. 
 
 His religious views, 83. 
 
 The Scots Reformation position, 
 83-88. 
 
 His relations to Calvinism, 89- 
 96. 
 
 Not a zealot, 90. 
 
 His views of Evangelium, 90. 
 
 His pension, 92. 
 
 His dirge upon Calvin, 93. 
 
 His period of doubt, 98. 
 
 Why he never took orders, 101. 
 
 Is Conformity allowable? 104. 
 
 Renaissance morals, 106. 
 
 Buchanan's amorist poetry, 107. 
 
 Biographical facts, HI. 
 
 The Roman Catholic Church 
 and education, 112. 
 
 Lords of the Congregation and 
 
 education, 114. 
 His early years of education, 
 
 116. 
 Enlists as a volunteer to invade 
 
 England, 118. 
 Life at St. Andrews University, 
 
 119. 
 
 Proceeds to St. Barbe, 119. 
 Friendship with Earl of Cassilis, 
 
 119. 
 James v. invites him to write 
 
 Franciscanus, 121. 
 Leaves him to the vengeance of 
 
 Beaton, 122. 
 
 Escapes from prison to the Con- 
 tinent, 122. 
 Migrates to Portugal : seized 
 
 by the Inquisition, 123. 
 Imprisoned in a monastery, 
 
 where he translates the 
 
 Psalms, 123. 
 
 Returns to Scotland and de- 
 clares for Protestantism, 124. 
 Relations between Mary and 
 
 Buchanan, 125. 
 Accused of ingratitude towards 
 
 her, 126. 
 The multifariousness of his 
 
 work, 128. 
 Writes A dmonition to the Trew 
 
 Lords, 130. 
 Characteristics of his History oj 
 
 Scotland, 132. 
 Buchanan's last days, 133. 
 His burial-place and property 
 
 135- 
 
 Legend of his skull, 135. 
 Characteristics, 136. 
 Final summing up, 137-145. 
 Parallel drawn between Dr. 
 Wallace and Buchanan, 138. 
 Burns, 107, 116.
 
 INDEX 
 
 149 
 
 CALVIN, J. , 82, 89, 90, 92, 94, 100, 
 
 Cameron, 115. 
 
 Cargill, 115, 
 
 Carlyle.T.,34, 143. 
 
 Casaubon, 13. 
 
 Cassilis, Lord, 51, 119, 134. 
 
 Catullus, 66. 
 
 Chameleon, the, 50, 126. 
 
 Chapbooks on Buchanan, 21. 
 
 Charles n. , 9. 
 
 Cicero, 67. 
 
 Coimbra, college of, 51, 98. 
 
 College de Guyenne, 58. 
 
 Congregation, Lords of, 114, 115. 
 
 Covenanters, 115. 
 
 DARNLEY, 128, 134, 139. 
 
 Dawes, Canon, 15. 
 
 Detectio Marice Regince, 18, 50. 
 
 Diogenes, 69. 
 
 Dionysius, Lambinus, 67. 
 
 Dirge, the, 92. 
 
 Discipline, Book of, 112. 
 
 Divine right, 9, n, 50, 57. 
 
 Dryden, John, 10. 
 
 Dunbar, William, 121. 
 
 EDUCATION in Catholic days, 
 
 113. 
 
 Election, doctrine of, 90. 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 127. 
 England, invasion of, 118. 
 Erasmus, 13, 34, 96, 99, 100. 
 Eucharistic controversy, 99. 
 Evangelicals, the, 89. 
 
 FRANCE, 124. 
 
 Franciscanus, the, 50, 90, 98, 106, 
 
 121. 
 
 GAMALIEL, 58. 
 
 General Assembly of Church of 
 Scotland, 51. 
 
 Genethliacon, the, 56. 
 
 Gibbon, 67, 118. 
 
 Gouve"a, Andre 1 de, 58, 122, 123. 
 
 HACKNEY, the, 75. 
 
 Hamilton, Sir W., 135. 
 
 Hebrew Psalms, 43, 123. 
 
 Henry vm. , 127. 
 
 Heriot, J., 116. 
 
 Herod, King, 58. 
 
 Herodias, 58. 
 
 History of Scotland, 50, 57, 63, 
 
 132. 
 
 Horace, 66. 
 Hosack, 20. 
 Humanists, 27, 28, 43, 58, 83, 84, 
 
 126. 
 
 INCARNATION, the, 90. 
 Indulgences, 90. 
 Inquisition, the, 43, 98. 
 
 JAMES iv., 112. 
 James v. , 50, 120. 
 James vi., 46, 52, 56, 76. 
 Johnson, S., 15, 129. 
 Justification by Faith, 86, 90. 
 
 KlLLEARN, III. 
 
 Knox, J., ii, 37, 40, 75, 76, 81, 
 85, 92, 101, 102, 114, 115, 141. 
 
 LATIN Style, 17, 27, 132. 
 ' Lena ' poetry, the, 106. 
 Lennox, Earl of, 33, 37. 
 Leo X. , 84. 
 Lincoln's Inn Fields, 9. 
 
 Liv y. 31. 51, 132. 
 
 Luther, 84. 
 
 Lyndsay, Sir D., 50, 121. 
 
 MACAUSLAN, in. 
 Major, John, 65.
 
 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Mar, Countess of, 24, 81. 
 Mary.QueenofScots.ig, 31, 37, 40, 
 
 51, 64, 75, 92, 120, 127, 128, 139. 
 Mary of Guise, 102. 
 Melville, Andrew and James, 23, 
 
 40, 81, 102, 115. 
 Melville, Sir James, 52, 80. 
 Milton, John, 9, 10. 
 Moderator of Assembly, 51, 128. 
 Montaigne, 119. 
 Moray, Earl of, 32, 33, 37, 51, 81, 
 
 92, 121, 129, 130, 139. 
 Morton, Earl of, 73, 74, 75, 79. 
 
 NecEra pieces, 108. 
 Nicene Dogmas, 86. 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY, 9. 
 
 PAN^TIUS, 67. 
 
 Paris, University of, 116. 
 
 Paten, Guy, 16. 
 
 Pension, 92. 
 
 Petrus, Victorinus, 67. 
 
 Person, 15. 
 
 Portugal, 43, 51, 98, 123. 
 
 Predestinarianism, 86. 
 
 Principal of St. Leonard's, 51. 
 
 Private judgment, 86. 
 
 RANDOLPH, SirT., 63, 71, 81. 
 Reformation, Scots, n, 83, 85, 87, 
 120. 
 
 Renaissance, the, 83, 87, 96, 106. 
 Revolutions, English, American, 
 
 and French, n. 
 Rizzio, 128, 139. 
 Roman Catholic hospitality, 36. 
 
 Church, 28, 97, 99, 101. 
 
 Russell, Lord William, 9. 
 
 ST. ANDREWS, University of ,118, 
 
 129. 
 
 Sallust, 132. 
 
 Scaligers, the, 12, 13, 30, 48, 81. 
 Scott, Sir W., 116. 
 Seneca, 63, 67, 100. 
 Shairp, Principal, 107. 
 Shakespeare, 12, 15. 
 Skelton, Sir J., 20, 125. 
 Skull, Buchanan's, 135. 
 Socrates, 69, 100. 
 Stephanus, 12. 
 Stevenson, R. L. , 107. 
 Stoic philosopher, 53, 63, 66, 69, 
 
 73, 82, zoo. 
 
 TACITUS, 132. 
 Tennyson, 12, 127. 
 Thackeray, 34, 81. 
 Thyestes, the, 63. 
 Transubstantiation, 90. 
 
 WORDSWORTH, W., 14. 
 YOUNG, Peter, 53, 55, 57, 62.
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE 
 'FAMOUS SCOTS' SERIES. 
 
 Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. MACPHERSON, 
 
 The British Weekly says : 
 
 ' We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive appearance of the 
 first volume of their new series. The typography is everything that could be wished, 
 and the binding is most tasteful. . . . We heartily congratulate author and pub- 
 lishers on the happy commencement of this admirable enterprise.' 
 
 The Literary World says : 
 
 ' One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far outweighing in value 
 some more pretentious works with which we are familiar.' 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 'As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle's place in literature 
 and his influence in the domains of morals, politics, and social ethics, the volume 
 reveals not only care and fairness, but insight and a large capacity for original 
 thought and judgment.' 
 
 The Glasgow Daily Record says : 
 
 ' Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national series such as 
 they have projected." 
 
 The Educational News says : 
 ' The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking manner.' 
 
 Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by OLIPHANT SMEATON, 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 1 It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking genuine interest 
 in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well 
 in hand, and has used them to produce a portrait that is both lifelike and well 
 balanced.' 
 
 The People's Friend says : 
 
 ' Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as a well-balanced 
 estimate and review of his works.' 
 
 The Edinburgh Dispatch says : 
 ' The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his task.' 
 
 The Daily Record says : 
 
 ' The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr. Smeaton's 
 pages.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : 
 ' A careful and intelligent study.' 
 
 Of HUGH MILLER, by W. KEITH LEASK, 
 The Expository Times says : 
 
 'It is a right good book and a right true biography. . . . There is a very fine 
 sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Scotsman ; there is also a fine 
 choice of language in making it ours.' 
 The Bookseller says : 
 
 ' Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the simplicity, and yet the 
 greatness, of his hero, and the broad result of his life's work is very plainly and 
 carefully set forth. A short appreciation of his scientific labours, from the com- 
 petent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie t and a useful bibliography of his works, complete 
 a volume which is well worth reading for its own sake, and which forms a worthy 
 instalment in an admirable series.' 
 
 The Daily News says : 
 ' Leaves on us a very vivid impression.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON 'FAMOUS SCOTS' SvutSc&t&tttetl. 
 
 Of JOHN KNOX, by A. TAYLOR INNES, Mr. Hay Fleming, in 
 
 The Bookman says : 
 
 ' A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of that famous 
 Scot who helped so much to shape them.' 
 
 The Freeman says : 
 
 ' It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the great Reformer's life, 
 and in its estimate of his character and work it is calm, dispassionate, and well 
 balanced. ... It is a welcome addition to our Knox literature.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 ' There is vision in this book, as well as knowledge.' 
 
 The Sunday School Chronicle says : 
 
 'Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes's exquisite lecture on 
 Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is just the man to do justice to the 
 great Reformer, who is more to Scotland ' than any million of unblameable Scotsmen 
 who need no forgiveness.' His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish 
 ecclesiastical life, his religious insight, his chastened enthusiasm, have enabled the 
 author to produce an excellent piece of work. . . . It is a noble and inspiring theme, 
 and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to perfection.' 
 
 Of ROBERT BURNS, by GABRIEL SETOUN, 
 
 The New Age says : 
 
 ' It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good as Carlyle's Essay 
 and the pamphlet published by Dr. Nichol of Glasgow.' 
 
 The Methodist Times says : 
 
 ' We are inclined to regard it as the very best that has yet been produced. There 
 is a proper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does neither praise nor blame too copiously. 
 ... A difficult bit of work has been well done, and with fine literary and ethical 
 discrimination." 
 
 Youth says : 
 
 ' It is written with knowledge, judgment, and skill. . . . The author's estimate 
 of the moral character of Burns is temperate and discriminating ; he sees and states 
 his evil qualities, and beside these he places his good ones in their fulness, depth, 
 and splendour. The exposition of the special features marking the genius of the 
 poet is able and penetrating.' 
 
 Of THE BALLADISTS, by JOHN GEDDIE, 
 
 The Birmingham Daily Gazette says : 
 
 ' As a popular sketch of an intensely popular theme, Mr. Geddie's contribution to 
 the " Famous Scots Series" is most excellent.' 
 
 The Publishers' Circular says : 
 
 'It may be predicted that lovers of romantic literature will re-peruse the old 
 ballads with a quickened zest after reading Mr. Geddie's book. We have not had a 
 more welcome little volume for many a day.' 
 
 The New Age says : 
 
 ' One of the most delightful and eloquent appreciations of the ballad literature of 
 Scotland that has ever seen the light.' 
 
 The Spectator says : 
 
 ' The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value to the literary 
 history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which the subject has been treated 
 with deeper sympathy or out of a fuller knowledge.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON ' FAMOUS SCOTS ' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of RICHARD CAMERON, by Professor HERKLESS, 
 
 The Freeman says : 
 
 ' Professor Herkless has made us all his debtors by his thorough-going and 
 unwearied research, by his collecting materials from out-of-the-way quarters, and 
 making much that was previously vague and shadowy clear and distinct.' 
 
 The Christian News says : 
 
 'This volume is ably written, is full of interest and instruction, and enables the 
 reader to form a conception of the man who in his day and generation gave his life 
 for Christ's cause and kingdom.' 
 
 The Dundee Courier says : 
 
 ' In selecting Professor Herkless to prepare this addition to the " Famous Scots 
 Series" of books, the publishers have made an excellent choice. The vigorous, 
 manly style adopted is exactly suited to the subject, and Richard Cameron is pre- 
 sented to the reader in a manner as interesting as it is impressive. . . . Professor 
 Herkless has done remarkably well, and the portrait he has so cleverly delineated 
 of one of Scotland's most cherished heroes is one that will never fade.' 
 
 Of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON, 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 1 This little book is full o_f insight and knowledge, and by many picturesque 
 incidents and pithy sayings it helps us to understand in a vivid and intimate sense 
 the high qualities and golden deeds which rendered Sir James Simpson's strenuous 
 life impressive and memorable.' 
 
 The Daily Chronicle says : 
 
 ' It is indeed long since we have read such a charmingly-written biography as this 
 little Life^of the most typical and " Famous Scot" that his countrymen have been 
 proud of since the time of Sir Walter. . . . There is not a dull, irrelevant, or super- 
 flous page in all Miss Simpson's booklet, and she has performed the biographer's 
 chief duty that of selection with consummate skill and judgment.' 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : 
 
 ' The narrative throughout is well balanced, and the biographer has been wisely 
 advised in giving prominence to her father's great achievement the introduction of 
 chloroform and what led to it.' 
 
 Of THOMAS CHALMERS, by W. GARDEN BLAIKIE, 
 
 The Spectator says : 
 
 ' The most notable feature of Professor Blaikie's book and none could be more 
 commendable is its perfect balance and proportion. In other words, justice is 
 done equally to the private and to the public life of Chalmers, if possible greater 
 justice than has been done by Mrs. Oliphant.' 
 
 The Scottish Congregationalist says : 
 
 ' No one can read the admirable and vivid sketch of his life which Dr. Blaikie has 
 written without feeling admiration for the man, and gaining inspiration from his 
 example.' 
 
 Of JAMES BOSWELL, by W. KEITH LEASK, 
 
 The Spectator says : 
 
 ' This is one of the best volumes of the excellent " Famous Scots Series," and one 
 of the fairest and most discriminating biographies of Boswell that have ever 
 appeared.' 
 
 The Dundee Advertiser says : 
 
 ' It is the admirable manner in which the very complexity of the man is indicated 
 that makes W. Keith Leask's biography of him one of peculiar merit and interest. 
 ... It is not only a life of Boswell, but a picture of his time vivid, faithful, 
 impressive.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON ' FAMOUS SCOTS ' SERIES continued. 
 
 The Morning Leader says : 
 
 ' Mr. W. K. Leask has approached the biographer of Johnson in the only possible 
 way by which a really interesting book could have been arrived at by way of the 
 open mind. . . . The defence of Boswell in the concluding chapter of his delightful 
 study is one of the finest and most convincing passages that have recently appeared 
 in the field of British biography.' 
 
 Of TOBIAS SMOLLETT, by OLIPHANT SMEATON, 
 
 The Dundee Courier says : 
 
 ^ ' It is impossible to read the pages of this little work without being struck not only 
 by its historical value, but by the fairness of its criticism.' 
 
 The Weekly Scotsman says : 
 
 'The book is written in a crisp and lively style. . . . The picture of the great 
 novelist is complete and lifelike. Not only does Mr. Smeaton give a scholarly 
 sketch and estimate of Smollett's literary career, he constantly keeps the reader in 
 conscious touch and sympathy with his personality, and produces a portrait of the 
 man as a man which is not likely to be readily forgotten.' 
 
 The Newsagent and Booksellers' Review says : 
 
 ' Tobias Smollett was versatile enough to deserve a distinguished place in any 
 gallery of gifted Scots, such as the one to which Mr. Smeaton has contributed this 
 clever and lifelike portrait.' 
 
 Of FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, by W. G. T. OMOND, 
 
 The Edinburgh Evening News says : 
 
 ' The writer has given us in brief compass the pith of what is known about an able 
 and patriotic if somewhat dogmatic and impracticable Scotsman who lived in stormy 
 times. . . . Mr. Omond describes, in a clear, terse, vigorous way, the constitution 
 of the Old Scots Parliament, and the part taken by Fletcher as a public man in the 
 stormy debates that took place prior to the union of the Parliaments in 1707. This 
 part of the book gives an admirable summary of the state of Scottish politics and of 
 the national feeling at an important period.' 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : 
 
 ' Unmistakably the most interesting and complete story of the life of Fletcher of 
 Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr. Omond has had many facilities placed at his 
 disposal, and of these he has made excellent use.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' Mr. Omond has told the story of Fletcher of Saltoun in this monograph with 
 ability and judgment.' 
 
 Of THE BLACKWOOD GROUP, by Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS, 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 1 In brief compass, Sir George Douglas gives us skilfully blended together much 
 pleasantly written biography and just and judicious criticism.' 
 
 The Weekly Citizen says : 
 
 'It need not be said that to every one interested in the literature of the first half 
 of the century, and especially to every Scotsman so interested, "The Blackwood 
 Group " is a phrase abounding in promise. And really Sir George Douglas fulfils 
 the promise he tacitly makes in his title. He is intimately acquainted not only with 
 the books of the different members of the "group," but also with their environment, 
 social and otherwise. Besides, he writes with sympathy as well as knowledge.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON 'FAMOUS SCOTS' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of NORMAN MACLEOD, by JOHN WELLWOOD, 
 
 The Star says : 
 
 ' A worthy addition to the " Famous Scots Series " is that of Norman Macleod, the 
 renowned minister of the Barony of Glasgow, and a man as typical of everything 
 generous and broadminded in the State Church in Scotland as Thomas Guthrie was 
 in the Free Churches. The biography is the work of John Wellwood, who has 
 approached it with proper appreciation of the robustness of the subject.' 
 
 The Scots Pictorial says : 
 
 1 Its general picturesqueness is effective, while the criticism is eminently liberal and 
 sound.' 
 
 The Daily Free Press says : 
 
 ' It is one of the great merits of Mr. Wellwood's book that it is wholly free from 
 dulness. His attention once secured, the reader is carried irresistibly along till he 
 has finished the whole of the fascinating story.' 
 
 The Daily Chronicle says : 
 
 ' Mr. Wellwood is in thorough sympathy with his hero, and has given us in this 
 little volume a graphic and picturesque sketch of him.' 
 
 Of SIR WALTER SCOTT, by GEORGE SAINTSBURY, 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says : 
 
 ' Mr. Saintsbury's miniature is a gem of its kind. . . . Mr. Saintsbury's critique of 
 the Waverley Novels will, I venture to think, despite all that has been written upon 
 them, discover fresh beauties for their admirers.' 
 
 The Morning Leader says : 
 'A fresh and charming biography.' 
 
 The St. James's Gazette says : 
 
 ' Apart from Lockhart, we do not know any one who has given a better picture of 
 Scott than Mr. Saintsbury, and there is no sounder and more comprehensive estimate 
 of his work.' 
 
 The Scots Magazine says : 
 
 ' The little volume is bright, informative reading, and is a worthy addition to a 
 capital and much-needed series.' 
 
 Of KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE, by Louis A. BARBE, 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 ' Mr. Barbe's sketch sticks close to the facts of his life, and these are sought out 
 from the best sources and are arranged with much judgment, and on the whole with 
 an impartial mind.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : 
 
 ' A conscientious and thorough piece of work, showing wide and accurate know- 
 ledge.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' This scholarly monograph seeks to unravel the seeming contradictions of a great 
 career, as well as to show that Kirkcaldy of Grange was a sincere patriot.' 
 
 The Bookseller says : 
 ' Mr. Barbe has put together a very instructive and interesting account of his
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON ' FAMOUS SCOTS ' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of ROBERT FERGUSSON, by DR. A. B. GROSART, 
 
 The Westminster Gazette says : 
 
 ' One of the most interesting of the " Famous Scots " Series is devoted to " Robert 
 Fergusson" the poet, to whom "the greater Robert," as he freely acknowledged, was 
 under so many obligations. Dr. Grosart is perhaps the best living authority on all 
 that relates to the bard of " The Farmer's Ingle," and he gives many new facts and 
 corrects a number of erroneous statements that have hitherto obtained currency 
 respecting him. We have read it with genuine pleasure.' 
 
 The British Weekly says : 
 
 ' It is a creditable, useful, and painstaking book, a genuine contribution to 
 Scottish literary history.' 
 
 The North British Daily Mail says : 
 
 ' The little volume is a thoroughly competent piece of work, and forms a valuable 
 addition to an excellent series.' 
 
 The Weekly Scotsman says : 
 
 1 The book will be welcomed as a worthy addition to that wonderfully entertaining 
 and instructive series of biographies, the " Famous Scots." 
 
 Of JAMES THOMSON, by WILLIAM BAYNE, 
 
 The Daily News says : 
 
 ' A just appreciation of Thomson as poet and dramatist, and an interesting record 
 of the conditions under which he rose to fame, as also of his friendships with the great 
 ones of the eighteenth century.' 
 
 Literature says : 
 
 'The story of Thomson's claim to the disputed authorship of" Rule Britannia" is 
 sustained by his countryman with spirit, and in our judgment with success." 
 
 The Publishers' Circular says : 
 
 ' The book is one which every lover of Thomson will welcome, and which students 
 of poetry cannot well afford to neglect.' 
 
 The Spectator says : 
 
 ' This is one of the compactest and best written volumes of the useful series of 
 biographies to which it belongs.' 
 
 Of MUNGO PARK, by T. BANKS MACLACHLAN, 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : 
 
 ' We owe to Mr. Maclachlan not only a charming life-story, if at times a pathetic 
 one, but a vivid chapter in the romance of Africa. Geography has no more wonder- 
 ful tale than that dealing with the unravelling of the mystery of the Niger.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' Mr. Maclachlan recounts with incisive vigour the story of Mungo Park's heroic 
 wanderings and the services which he rendered to geographical research.' 
 
 The Kilmarnock Herald says : 
 ' It is a thrilling story, powerfully told, of one of Scotland's noblest sons.' 
 
 The Educational News says : 
 
 ' Mungo Park has his record here summarised in such a manner as to win, inform, 
 and delight.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON ' FAMOUS SCOTS ' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of DAVID HUME, by HENRY CALDERWOOD, 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' The little book is a virile recruit of the " Famous Scots Series." ' 
 'This monograph is both picturesque and critical.' 
 
 The New Age says : 
 
 ' To the many students of philosophy in Scotland a special interest will attach to 
 Professor Calderwood's sketch of David Hume from the fact that it is the last piece 
 of work done by its lamented author ; and very pleasing it is to note the fairness and 
 charity of the judgment passed by the most evangelical of philosophers upon the man 
 who used to be denounced as the prophet of infidelity.' 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 ' Fulfils admirably well the purpose of the writer, which was that of presenting in 
 clear, fair, and concise lines Hume and his philosophy to the mind of his countrymen 
 and of the world.' 
 
 The Publishers' Circular says : 
 
 ' This biography is well written, and it will no doubt be considered, as it really is, 
 one of the best of the " Famous Scots Series." ' 
 
 Of WILLIAM DUNBAR, by OLIPHANT SMEATON, 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' Mr. Smeaton looks narrowly into the characteristics of Dunbar's genius, and does 
 well to insist on the almost Shakespearian range of his gifts. He contends that in 
 elegy, as well as in satire and allegory, Dunbar's place in English literature is 
 amongst the great masters of the craft of letters.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : 
 
 ' This is a bright and picturesquely written monograph, presenting in readable 
 form the results of the critical research undertaken by Laing, Schipper, and the 
 other scholars who during the present century have done so much for the elucidation 
 of the greatest of our early Scottish poets.' 
 
 The Bailie says : 
 
 ' A graphic and informed account not only of the man and his works, but of his 
 immediate environment and of the times in which he lived.' 
 
 The Bookman says : 
 
 ' The book is an admirable biography, one of the liveliest and most readable in the 
 series.' 
 
 Of SIR WILLIAM WALLACE, by Professor MURISON, 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' Mr. Murison is to be congratulated on this little book. After much hard and 
 discriminative labour he has pieced together by far the best, one might say the only 
 rational and coherent, account of Wallace that exists.' 
 
 Mr. William Wallace in the Academy says : 
 ' Professor Murison has acquitted himself of his task like a patriot.' 
 ' Capital reading.' 
 
 The Daily News says : 
 
 ' A scholarly and_ impartial little volume, one of the best yet published in the 
 " Famous Scots Series." ' 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says : 
 
 'A bright little book which will be much relished north of the Tweed, and also 
 among those Scottish exiles who are supposed to be pining away their lives south 
 of it.' 
 
 The New Age says : 
 
 'Anyhow, here, at least, we have his life-story a most difficult tale to tell 
 recorded with a painstaking research and in a spirit of appreciative candour which 
 leave almost nothing to be desired.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON ' FAMOUS SCOTS ' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by MARGARET MOVES 
 BLACK, 
 
 The Banff's hire Journal says : 
 
 ' The portrait, drawn as it is by a loving hand, is absolutely photographic in its 
 likeness, and the literary criticisms with which the book is pleasantly studded are 
 alike careful and judicious, and with most of them the ordinary reader will cordially 
 agree.' 
 
 The Bookman says : 
 ' This little book is sure to get a welcome.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 'Sense and sensibility are in these pages, as well as knowledge and delicate 
 discrimination.' 
 
 The Outlook says : 
 
 ' Certainly one of the most charming biographies we have ever come across. The 
 writer has s_tyle, sympathy, distinction, and understanding. We were loth to put 
 the book aside. Its one fault is that it is too short.' 
 The Daily Free Press says : 
 
 ' One of the most charming sketches it is scarcely a biography of a literary man 
 that could be found has just been published as the latest number of the " Famous 
 Scots Series" " R. Louis Stevenson," by Miss Black. The excellence of the little 
 book lies in its artless charm, in its loose and easy style, in its author's evident love 
 and delight in her subject.' 
 
 Of THOMAS REID, by Professor CAMPBELL FRASER, 
 The North British Daily Mail says : 
 
 ' A model of sympathetic appreciation and of succinct and lucid exposition.' 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 ' Professor Campbell Eraser's volume on Thomas Reid is one of the most able and 
 valuable of an able and valuable series. He supplies what must be allowed to be a 
 distinct want in our literature, in the shape of a brief, popular, and accessible 
 biography of the founder of the so-called Scottish School of Philosophy, written with 
 notable perspicuity and sympathy by one who has made a special study of the 
 problems that engaged the mind of Reid.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : 
 
 ' We do not know any volume of the " Famous Scots Series " that deserves or is 
 likely to receive a heartier welcome from the educated public than this life and 
 estimate of Reid by Professor Campbell Fraser. The writer is no amateur, but a 
 past-master in the subject of Scottish philosophy, and it has evidently been a real 
 pleasure to him to expiscate quite a number of new facts regarding the professional 
 and private life of its best representative.' 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says : 
 
 ' The little work is of high excellence comprehensive in view, clear in exposition, 
 and exemplary in literary style.' 
 
 The Saturday Review says : 
 
 ' Mr. Campbell Fraser has added to the " Famous Scots Series " an excellent little 
 book on Reid and his philosophyj dealing lucidly with the philosopher's relations 
 with contemporary thinkers and with modern thought.' 
 
 Of POLLOK AND AYTOUN, by ROSALINE MASSON, 
 
 The Spectator says : 
 
 ' One of the most artistically conceived and gracefully written of the series to which 
 it belongs.' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : 
 
 ' The facts of the two lives are presented by Miss Masson with intelligence and 
 spirit, and the volume will take a good place among the rest of the series.'
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON 'FAMOUS SCOTS' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of ADAM SMITH, by HECTOR C. MACPHERSON, 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' This little book is written with brains and a degree of courage which is in keeping 
 with its convictions. It has vision, too, and that counts for righteousness, if any- 
 where, in political economy.' 
 
 The Echo says : 
 
 ' Smith's life is briefly and clearly told, and there is a good deal of independent 
 criticism interspersed amidst the chapters on the philosopher's two principal 
 treatises. Mr. Macpherson's analysis of Smith's economic teaching makes excellent 
 reading. ' 
 
 The Scots Pictorial says : 
 
 ' One of the best of an admirable series.' 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer says : 
 
 ' I have learned much from your sketch of Adam Smith's life and work. It pre- 
 sents the essential facts in a lucid and interesting way. Especially am I glad to see 
 that you have insisted upon the individualistic character of his teaching. It is well 
 that his authority on the side of individualism should be put forward in these days 
 of rampant Socialism, when the great mass of legislative measures extend public 
 agency and restrict private agency ; the advocates of such measures being blind to 
 the fact that by small steps they are bringing about a state in which the citizen will 
 have lost all freedom. ' 
 
 The Glasgow Herald says : 
 
 ' A sound and able piece of work, and contains a fair and discerning estimate of 
 Smith in his essential character as the author of the doctrine of Free Trade, and 
 consequently of the modern science of economics.' 
 
 Of ANDREW MELVILLE, by WILLIAM MORISON, 
 
 The Spectator says : 
 
 ' The story is well told, and it takes one through a somewhat obscure period with 
 which it is well to be acquainted. No better guide could be found than Mr. Morison.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' The great aspects of his career as Principal of Glasgow and then o_f St. Andrews 
 it has been said that the European renown of the Scottish Universities began with 
 Melville are admirably discussed in this virile, and at the same time critical 
 monograph. 1 
 
 The North British Daily Mail says : 
 
 ' Mr. Morison outlines the main facts of Melville's life-work with singular lucidity 
 and point. _ He displays a full and accurate_ knowledge of the ecclesiastical history 
 of the period, and his judgments are invariably sound. Altogether the book is one 
 of the best of the series." 
 
 The British Weekly says : 
 
 ' Mr. Morison writes with full knowledge of Scottish history, and also with what 
 is equally important, perfect sympathy with the strong men who made it.' 
 
 The Academy says : 
 1 Mr. Morison has told Melville's story with a care for accurate history.' 
 
 Of JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER, by E. S. HALDANE, 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 ' Ferrier the man, and even Ferrier the professor, Miss Haldane brings near to 
 us, an attractive and interesting figure. 1 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says : 
 
 1 His splendid and transcendental thought and fine eloquence were so inspiring 
 and stimulating, and his personal charm was so fascinating, that a study of the man 
 must engage the sympathies of every student. The author, who is already known 
 for admirable work in the philosophical field, has written an excellent? exposition of 
 Ferrier's views.
 
 PRESS OPINIONS ON 'FAMOUS SCOTS' SERIES continued. 
 
 Of KING ROBERT THE BRUCE, by Professor MURISON, 
 
 The Morning Leader says : 
 
 ' Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but every man 
 who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told will be grateful.' 
 
 The Aberdeen Journal says : 
 
 ' The story of Bruce is brilliantly told in clear and flexible language, which draws 
 the reader on with the interest of a novel. Professor Murison is a most impartial 
 and thoroughly reliable critic, and may be followed with confidence by all who 
 desire a truthful and unprejudiced picture of this greatest of the Scots.' 
 
 The Leeds Mercury says : 
 'A worthy, as it is a necessary, addition loan admirable series.' 
 
 The Speaker says : 
 
 ' He has sifted for himself State records, official papers, old chronicles, and has 
 come to his own conclusions without the aid of modern historians. Therein lies the 
 value of the book : it is a fresh, independent, critical estimate of a man whc 
 emancipated Scotland from a thraldom which was almost worse than death. Bruce's 
 career from first to last is described in these pages with uncompromised fidelity, and 
 no attempt is made to gloss over the faults of a masterful nature." 
 
 The Morning Leader says : 
 
 ' Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but every man 
 who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told, will be grateful.' 
 
 Of JAMES HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD, by Sir 
 
 GEORGE DOUGLAS, 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 ' Sir George Douglas has contributed a gracefully written and well-knit biography 
 of the Ettrick Shepherd to the "Famous Scots" Series. It follows in a spirit of 
 kindly criticism the steps of Hogg through the shadow and sunshine, the failures 
 and successes of his career, from the hillsides of Yarrow and Ettrick to the more 
 slippery places of the world of literature, and back again to the solitude of the 
 forest ; and it gives us judicious and sympathetic appreciations of his work in prose 
 and in verse, much of it already fallen into unmerited neglect.' 
 
 The New Age says : 
 'A capital biography full, careful, discriminating, and sympathetic.' 
 
 The Daily News says : 
 
 'The story of James Hogg's manly, honourable battle with poverty, and of his 
 literary achievement, is excellently told by Sir George Douglas.' 
 
 The Expository Times says : 
 
 ' The book is accurate, and must have cost research, but it is written in a pleasant 
 gossipy manner, quite as if Hogg had flung the flavour of Hogg's writings over his 
 biographer.' 
 
 Saint Andrew says : 
 
 ' We have no hesitation in saying that this valuable and interesting volume will 
 be welcomed by the Scots people as heartily as any that have preceded it.' 
 
 Of THOMAS CAMPBELL, by J. CUTHBERT HADDEN, 
 
 The Scotsman says : 
 
 'A very useful, compact, well-digested, and well-written account of Campbell's 
 career and literary labours.'
 
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